What Would It Take for Charles Darwin To Beat the Eugenics Charge

Part 1:  Galton

As his defenders will point out,  Charles Darwin died before his cousin Francis Galton gave eugenics its name.   That is true,  Darwin died on April 19, 1882,  Galton named his "science" "eugenics" the next year.  That is the first life preserver that is thrown to the eugenics-free Charles Darwin.  However, Galton first used the word "eugenics" in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development.   In his introduction to that book, he says:

Since the publication of my work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them. 

Clearly, Galton dated the beginning of his "science" to his book, Hereditary Genius, though he worked the idea in the years before he published Inquiries into Human Faculty.  That is a vital point in determining what part Charles Darwin played as inspiring eugenics.   In chapter twenty of his Memories of My Life,  Francis Galton explicitly credits Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his research that produced Hereditary Genius.

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science...




... I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

Galton goes on to say:

After many months of hard work, I wrote, in I865, two preliminary papers in Macmillan's Magazine, entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character" .  These contain the germs of many of my subsequent memoirs, the contents of which went to the making of the following books: Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics.  On re-reading these articles, I must say that, considering the novel conditions under which they were composed, and notwithstanding some crudeness here and there, I am surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness.

This names The Origin of Species as the inspiration of  articles and the book, Hereditary Genius in the line that includes "Human Faculty.... "and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics".  There is no possible better authority than Francis Galton on the question of what inspired him to invent eugenics.   And since the book that inspired Galton was written by Charles Darwin, he is named by Galton as inspiring eugenics.   Unless, sometime in the three years remaining to Francis Galton, he retracted that attribution, there could not be more solid evidence tying Charles Darwin to eugenics, nothing else could loosen the knots doing that.

However, there are things that could tighten them.  Francis Galton was only too glad to provide that in the same chapter:


Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy. 

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"


So, Charles Darwin effusively endorsed Hereditary Genius as he was reading it. Did he change his mind after finishing it and reject its quite developed eugenics? No. We know that from the authority of Charles Darwin, himself. In his second major book setting out his account of evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin repeatedly and enthusiastically cited and endorsed both Hereditary Genius and other articles by Francis Galton, as well as other eugenicists.  Just a sample of Darwin's citations of Galton's eugenics.

- With man we see similar facts in almost every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton (10. 'Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,' 1869.), that genius which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited; and, on the other hand, it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families. -

- This, as Mr. Galton (49. See his remarkable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' 1869, p. 349.

 -  see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865*, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors

 - See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.

The connections between Charles Darwin and eugenics begin at the start of it, with the attribution of the man who invented the "science" and who coined the word. In the very terms that Galton gives as the beginning of eugenics, Charles Darwin confirms that attribution by his letter to Galton and his laudatory citations in what was supposed to be a major science publication.   Short of subsequent retractions from both of them, the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics has to stand as proven.  Not only suggested, not only inferred but proven.

Charles Darwin's son,  Leonard Darwin**, succeeded Francis Galton as the head of  the British Eugenics Society in 1911.  Three of Darwin's other sons,  George (I'd guess the one he mentions in his letter to Galton), Francis, and Horace Darwin were also active in eugenics as were numerous other members of Charles Darwin's family.   No one who never met Charles Darwin, no one in the post WWII period when the eugenics-free Charles Darwin seems to have been constructed, knew Charles Darwin better than his own children and those who did what none of us has done, talked with the man, unrecorded.   If any of them believed their eugenics activity was a violation of their father's ideas, I've never found evidence of that.   Other than Charles Darwin, there is no higher authority in this question of what Charles Darwin thought about this "science" than his own children.  Just as there is no higher authority in what inspired Galton to invent eugenics than Francis Galton,  himself.

In the six years I've been looking into this question, I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics,  I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics.  I have never found anyone trying to do that until after the Nazis showed the world what eugenics could turn into, discrediting the "science" for a generation***.   The events of that time put anyone wanting to keep Charles Darwin as the face of evolutionary science in a difficult position.   Natural selection, in the form of On the Origin of Species, was cited as the inspiring idea of eugenics by the man who invented eugenics.   Natural selection and the allegation that human civilization impeded it and that with natural selection impeded, the human species would fall into ruin was the foundation of eugenics****, it was the only reason that it developed as a legal and political application of purported science.

The large majority of the evidence confirming that evolution is real has been discovered since Charles Darwin died.   Other explanations of change in organisms have been discovered, sometimes introduced to the opposition and eventually grudging acceptance of those who demand that natural selection is the supreme law of biology.   In the most extreme cases the advocates of natural selection attempt to extend it to areas outside of the origin of species in biology,  even quite irrationally and with absolutely no evidence.

I don't think evolutionary science needs Charles Darwin in 2012, certainly not the phony, eugenics-free Charles Darwin that is the common received POV required to be a respectable member of the "educated class".  Quite frankly,  I think the major use of that Charles Darwin is an entirely non-scientific one, it is an icon of ideology, class status, social acceptability and mutual admiration, permission to disdain anyone who dares to violate the myth.  In the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.

That creationists, both in their primitive form and in the ID industry, have done that, they've poured over the record left by Charles Darwin, his family and associates and his followers, and have discovered the same quotes, the same absolutely solid case that Charles Darwin is absolutely tied to eugenics and its legacy only means that that record has been there and always will be.   They are nothing if not dedicated to discovering any ammunition that is provided to them by Darwin and his friends. To the extent that evolutionary science keeps Charles Darwin as its figure head, it will find he's a political liability. The denial of his record in regard to eugenics is a lie, it is unworthy of people pretending to uphold science and the truth, the result of denying that record is a failed PR campaign, a trade mark that doesn't work with most people.  The best the Darwin Fan Club can hope for is a slight mitigation to what that record shows.   If they continue to deny that record, they certainly don't do anything for evolutionary science,  I'd guess the Darwin cult is more likely to impede progress than to help it.  To the extent they insist on keeping their artificial Darwin,  it is a good indication of how much more they value ideology instead of science.

Note:  I have not discussed Charles Darwin saying that Emma Darwin, his wife, read him Hereditary Genius, no doubt during one of Darwin's many bouts of illness, and that she seems, according to her husband, to be interested in Galton's earliest eugenics as well.  I haven't looked at her diaries to see if she said anything about that, herself.   I have never read anyone taking note of her in relation to eugenics in the last six years of looking into this question.


*  Perhaps the same article that Galton cites as early eugenics material in his Memoir.
**  I will be citing Leonard Darwin in the next part of this series.
***  I will contend that eugenics is gaining traction in a future post.  That is what makes this important.
****  This will also figure importantly later in this series.  It is important to note that Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who is considered the co-discoverer, I would say co-inventor, of the theory of natural selection, vehemently denounced eugenics as pseudo-scientific and the meddling of "an arrogant scientific priestcraft".   So, the idea that natural selection necessarily leads to eugenics is clearly false.  I might get around to giving my theory of why Wallace's thought on that question developed so differently than the Darwin side of it did.

Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics

As his defenders will point out,  Charles Darwin died before his cousin Francis Galton gave eugenics its name.   That is true,  Darwin died on April 19, 1882,  Galton named his "science" "eugenics" the next year.  That is the first life preserver that is thrown to the mythical, eugenics-free Charles Darwin.  However, Galton first used the word "eugenics" in his book "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development".   In his introduction to that book, he says:

Since the publication of my work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them. 

Clearly, Galton dated the beginning of his "science" to his book "Hereditary Genius", though he worked the idea in the years before he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty".  That is a vital point in determining what part Charles Darwin played as inspiring eugenics.   In chapter twenty of his Memories of My Life,  Francis Galton explicitly credits Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his research that produced "Hereditary Genius".

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science...






... I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

Galton goes on to say:

After many months of hard work, I wrote, in I865, two preliminary papers in Macmillan's Magazine, entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character" .  These contain the germs of many of my subsequent memoirs, the contents of which went to the making of the following books: Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics.  On re-reading these articles, I must say that, considering the novel conditions under which they were composed, and notwithstanding some crudeness here and there, I am surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness.

This names "The Origin of Species" as the inspiration of  articles and the book, "Hereditary Genius" in the line that includes "Human Faculty.... "and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics".  There is no possible better authority than Francis Galton on the question of what inspired him to invent eugenics.   And since the book that inspired Galton was written by Charles Darwin, he is named by Galton as inspiring eugenics.   Unless, sometime in the three years remaining to Francis Galton, he retracted that attribution, there could not be more solid evidence tying Charles Darwin to eugenics, nothing else could loosen the knots doing that.

However, there are things that could tighten them.  Francis Galton was only too glad to provide that in the same chapter:


Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy. 

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"


So, Charles Darwin effusively endorsed "Hereditary Genius" as he was reading it, or rather having it read to him. Did he change his mind after finishing it and reject its quite developed eugenics? No. We know that from the authority of Charles Darwin, himself. In his second major book setting out his account of evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin repeatedly and enthusiastically cited and endorsed both Hereditary Genius and other articles by Francis Galton, as well as other eugenicists.  Just a sample of Darwin's citations of Galton's eugenics.

- With man we see similar facts in almost every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton (10. 'Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,' 1869.), that genius which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited; and, on the other hand, it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families. -

- This, as Mr. Galton (49. See his remarkable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' 1869, p. 349.

 -  see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865*, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors

 - See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.

The connections between Charles Darwin and eugenics begin at the start of it, with the attribution of the man who invented the "science" and who coined the word. In the very terms that Galton gives as the beginning of eugenics, Charles Darwin confirms that attribution by his letter to Galton and his laudatory citations in what was supposed to be a major science publication.   Short of subsequent retractions from both of them, the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics has to stand as proven.  Not only suggested, not only inferred but proven.

Charles Darwin's son,  Leonard Darwin**, succeeded Francis Galton as the head of  the British Eugenics Society in 1911.  Three of Darwin's other sons,  George (the one he mentions in his letter to Galton), Francis, and Horace Darwin were also active in eugenics, as were numerous other members of Charles Darwin's family.

No one who never met Charles Darwin, no one in the post WWII period when the eugenics-free Charles Darwin seems to have been constructed, knew Charles Darwin better than his own children and those who did what none of us has done, talked with the man, unrecorded.

If any of them believed their eugenics activity was a violation of their father's ideas, I've never found evidence of that.   Other than Charles Darwin, there is no higher authority in this question of what Charles Darwin thought about this "science" than his own children.  Just as there is no higher authority in what inspired Galton to invent eugenics than Francis Galton,  himself.

In the seven years I've been looking into this question, I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics,  I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics.  I have never found anyone trying to do that until after the Nazis showed the world what eugenics could turn into, discrediting the "science" for a generation***.   The events of that time put anyone wanting to keep Charles Darwin as the face of evolutionary science in a difficult position.   Natural selection, in the form of "On the Origin of Species", was cited as the inspiring idea of eugenics by the man who invented eugenics.   Natural selection and the allegation that human civilization impeded it and that with natural selection impeded, the human species would fall into ruin was the foundation of eugenics****, it was the only reason that it developed as a legal and political application of purported science.

The large majority of the evidence confirming that evolution is real has been discovered since Charles Darwin died.   Other explanations of change in organisms have been discovered, sometimes introduced to the opposition and eventually grudging acceptance of those who demand that natural selection is the supreme law of biology.   In the most extreme cases the advocates of natural selection attempt to extend it to areas outside of the origin of species in biology,  even quite irrationally and with absolutely no evidence.

I don't think evolutionary science needs Charles Darwin in 2012, certainly not the phony, eugenics-free Charles Darwin that is the common received POV required to be a respectable member of the "educated class".  Quite frankly,  I think the major use of that Charles Darwin is an entirely non-scientific one, it is an icon of ideology, class status, social acceptability and mutual admiration, permission to disdain anyone who dares to violate the myth. He is an icon of atheism and materialism, as he clearly was in his own time and, by his readings of Galton, Huxley, Haeckel and others, with his full knowledge.

The biggest irony of the cult of Charles Darwin among those who believe themselves to be paragons of intellectual life is that, in the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony St. Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.  They couldn't possibly have read him and still maintain that he was not an ardent supporter of Galton's developing eugenics, or of Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme exposition of it within his materialist monist system. 

Creationists, both in their primitive form and in the ID industry, have done that, they've poured over the record left by Charles Darwin, his family and associates and his followers, and have discovered the same quotes, the same absolutely solid case that Charles Darwin is absolutely tied to eugenics and its legacy only means that that record has been there and always will be.   They are nothing if not dedicated to discovering any ammunition that is provided to them by Darwin and his friends. There is nothing illegitimate or unfair of their honest use of that record, though some have distorted it, a sin they share with many of his supporters.  Charles Darwin's own words are there for anyone to read, to understand and to comment on.  Having read him, fully, on this charge, that Darwin was a eugenicist, there is no doubt as to his guilt.  There isn't even a reasonable doubt that he might not have been.

To the extent that evolutionary science keeps Charles Darwin as its figure head, it will find he's a political liability. The denial of his record in regard to eugenics is a lie, it is unworthy of people pretending to uphold science and the truth, the result of denying that record is a failed PR campaign, a trade mark that doesn't work with most people.  The best the Darwin Fan Club can hope for is a slight mitigation to what that record shows.   If they continue to deny that record, they certainly don't do anything for evolutionary science,  I'd guess the Darwin cult is more likely to impede progress than to help it.  To the extent they insist on keeping their artificial Darwin,  it is a good indication of how much more they value ideology instead of science.

Note:  I have not discussed Charles Darwin saying that Emma Darwin, his wife, read him Hereditary Genius, probably during one of Darwin's many bouts of illness, and that she seems, according to her husband, to be interested in Galton's earliest eugenics as well.  I haven't looked at her diaries to see if she said anything about that, herself.   I have never read anyone taking note of her in relation to eugenics in the last six years of looking into this question.


*  Perhaps the same article that Galton cites as early eugenics material in his Memoir.

**  I will be citing Leonard Darwin in the next part of this series.

***  I will contend that eugenics is gaining traction in a future post.  That is what makes this important.

****  This will also figure importantly later in this series.  It is important to note that Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who is considered the co-discoverer, I would say co-inventor, of the theory of natural selection, vehemently denounced eugenics as pseudo-scientific and the meddling of "an arrogant scientific priestcraft".   So, the idea that natural selection necessarily leads to eugenics is clearly false, though it seems to more often than not.  I might get around to giving my theory of why Wallace's thought on that question developed so differently than the Darwin side of it did.

I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics, I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics. - That Post-WWII Myth Is A Transparent Lie

IT WAS PREDICTABLE that someone would revive the dodge "the word eugenics didn't exist when Darwin was alive," as if that meant he could not have been guilty of supporting or inspiring eugenics.    That is something I addressed in one of the first posts I did on this topic and disproved as definitively as it is possible for a statement outside of mathematics to be,  disproven through the very words of Charles Darwin presented as reliable science and those of the man who invented eugenics, Francis Galton.  

What they said is definite proof that the entire post-WWII distancing of Darwin from eugenics, from its most deceptively harmless form to the kind that Darwin himself, Ernst Haeckel,  Karl Pearson, etc. advocated as salubrious to the human race, the deaths of not only individuals taken by them to be inferior but even up to and including entire races of people.  That is something I repeatedly proved was said by Darwin, as science, certainly from a book his supporters should have read, The Descent of Man and in other documents, letters, etc. which are available from those who are dedicated to the deification of the man.

I don't consider the many posts I did on this topic to have been major feats of research or reasoning.   After a while of finding exactly the kind of thing I assumed was said by this or that Darwinist scientist was said by them, in their own words turned kind of every-day because of course they would say that.  I expected to find the links from Darwin and his major claim to fame, natural selection, to just about every claim made for and about eugenics INCLUDING THE EUGENICS OF THE NAZIS because they were persuading each other and the public to let them do appalling things to other people, they would have had to use what was considered the highest of scientific authority to persuade the public to let them do it, to encourage themselves to do it with the zeal they all seem to have felt in their mission to cut the "unfit" out of the human future.  The ease with which I found the primary documentation makes the scandal of it being successfully buried AMONG THOSE WITH COLLEGE-CREDENTIALS and others all the more a symptom of the dishonesty of modern, materialist-scientistic-atheist secular culture.  

I knew from the start that I was violating some of the major taboos of the college-credentialed common received culture when I started this, I retained some of its dishonest practices until very recently, such as disclaiming the identification of eugenics as a scientific endeavor - something which would have seemed bizarre to anyone much before the end of WWII.  I have tried to remove things like scare quotes around the word "science"  from this because it is a fact that science includes whatever scientists say it does during the period in which they control science, including ideas that are dropped later. But scientists should not be able to claim that ideas so dropped were not accepted as science nor that such ideas lose their potency once they are dropped within science.  The repute with which science is accepted makes its mistakes have a lingering potency in real life.  As I have also proven in the many posts I did on this topic, scientists have not, in fact, given up eugenics or even much mitigated their most depraved of racist and class based claims out of it.  Scientists in the post war period, SCIENTISTS PUBLISHING AS SCIENTISTS IN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS WHILE HOLDING FACULTY POSITIONS AND OTHERS WITHIN OFFICIAL SCIENCE have claimed as science everything from the most primitive of racial inequality, antisemitic claims, the necessity of aborting fetuses believed to be disabled, the killing of infants who are born with defects, etc.  

And that's just eugenics within today's science, its position, named or not, in popular culture, in politics, in the law, in the superstition of judges and "justices", among lawyers and members of juries is probably even more insidious and dangerous,  Science still is one of the major props of racism, emerging at times in racism being advocated on the basis of scientific claims, those invented by the racists and, not infrequently, motivated by what some scientist has claimed on the basis of natural selection and its logical consequence, the science of eugenics.   That alone makes me willing to continue to prove my case, though I don't see any reason to reinvent this particular wheel.  That case was closed  the first time I posted this.

 Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics

As his defenders will point out,  Charles Darwin died before his cousin Francis Galton gave eugenics its name.   That is true,  Darwin died on April 19, 1882,  Galton named his science "eugenics" the next year.  That is the first life preserver that is thrown to the mythical, eugenics-free Charles Darwin.  However, Galton first used the word "eugenics" in his book "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development".   In his introduction to that book, he says:

Since the publication of my work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them.

Clearly, Galton dated the beginning of his science to his book "Hereditary Genius", though he worked the idea in the years before he published "Inquiries into Human Faculty".  That is a vital point in determining what part Charles Darwin played as inspiring eugenics.   In chapter twenty of his Memories of My Life,  Francis Galton explicitly credits Charles Darwin as the inspiration of his research that produced "Hereditary Genius".

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.

.. I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

Galton goes on to say:

After many months of hard work, I wrote, in I865, two preliminary papers in Macmillan's Magazine, entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character" .  These contain the germs of many of my subsequent memoirs, the contents of which went to the making of the following books: Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics.  On re-reading these articles, I must say that, considering the novel conditions under which they were composed, and notwithstanding some crudeness here and there, I am surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness.

This names "The Origin of Species" as the inspiration of  articles and the book, "Hereditary Genius" in the line that includes "Human Faculty.... "and to my quite recent writings on Eugenics".  There is no possible better authority than Francis Galton on the question of what inspired him to invent eugenics.   And since the book that inspired Galton was written by Charles Darwin, he is named by Galton as inspiring eugenics.   Unless, sometime in the three years remaining to Francis Galton, he retracted that attribution, there could not be more solid evidence tying Charles Darwin to eugenics, nothing else could loosen the knots doing that.

However, there are things that could tighten them.  Francis Galton was only too glad to provide that in the same chapter:

Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy.

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"

So, Charles Darwin effusively endorsed "Hereditary Genius" as he was reading it, or rather having it read to him. Did he change his mind after finishing it and reject its quite developed eugenics? No. We know that from the authority of Charles Darwin, himself. In his second major book setting out his account of evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin repeatedly and enthusiastically cited and endorsed both Hereditary Genius and other articles by Francis Galton, as well as other eugenicists.  Just a sample of Darwin's citations of Galton's eugenics.

- With man we see similar facts in almost every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton (10. 'Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,' 1869.), that genius which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited; and, on the other hand, it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families. -

- This, as Mr. Galton (49. See his remarkable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' 1869, p. 349.

 -  see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865*, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors

 - See, also, Mr. Galton, 'Hereditary Genius,' pp. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.

The connections between Charles Darwin and eugenics begin at the start of it, with the attribution of the man who invented the science and who coined the word. In the very terms that Galton gives as the beginning of eugenics, Charles Darwin confirms that attribution by his letter to Galton and his laudatory citations in what was supposed to be a major science publication.   Short of subsequent retractions from both of them, the charge that Charles Darwin inspired eugenics has to stand as proven.  Not only suggested, not only inferred but proven.

Charles Darwin's son,  Leonard Darwin**, succeeded Francis Galton as the head of  the British Eugenics Society in 1911.  Three of Darwin's other sons,  George (the one he mentions in his letter to Galton), Francis, and Horace Darwin were also active in eugenics, as were numerous other members of Charles Darwin's family.

No one who never met Charles Darwin, no one in the post WWII period when the eugenics-free Charles Darwin seems to have been constructed, knew Charles Darwin better than his own children and those who did what none of us has done, talked with the man, unrecorded.

If any of them believed their eugenics activity was a violation of their father's ideas, I've never found evidence of that.   Other than Charles Darwin, there is no higher authority in this question of what Charles Darwin thought about this science than his own children.  Just as there is no higher authority in what inspired Galton to invent eugenics than Francis Galton,  himself.

In the seven years I've been looking into this question, I have never found anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics,  I've never found anyone who knew him deny his role in inspiring the eugenics of Francis Galton or in their own eugenics.  I have never found anyone trying to do that until after the Nazis showed the world what eugenics could turn into, discrediting the science for a generation***.   The events of that time put anyone wanting to keep Charles Darwin as the face of evolutionary science in a difficult position.   Natural selection, in the form of "On the Origin of Species", was cited as the inspiring idea of eugenics by the man who invented eugenics.   Natural selection and the allegation that human civilization impeded it and that with natural selection impeded, the human species would fall into ruin was the foundation of eugenics****, it was the only reason that it developed as a legal and political application of purported science.  It is the scientific basis of all eugenics laws, in the English speaking countries, in other countries, including those adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s. 

The large majority of the evidence confirming that evolution is real has been discovered since Charles Darwin died.   Other explanations of change in organisms have been discovered, sometimes introduced to the opposition and eventually grudging acceptance of those who demand that natural selection is the supreme law of biology.   In the most extreme cases the advocates of natural selection attempt to extend it to areas outside of the origin of species in biology,  even quite irrationally and with absolutely no evidence.  An extreme example of this is the ultra-Darwinist Daniel Dennett.

I don't think evolutionary science needs Charles Darwin in 2012[when I first wrote this], certainly not the phony, eugenics-free Charles Darwin that is the common received POV required to be a respectable member of the "educated class".  Quite frankly,  I think the major use of that Charles Darwin is an entirely non-scientific one, it is an icon of ideology, class status, social acceptability and mutual admiration, permission to disdain anyone who dares to violate the myth. He is an icon of atheism and materialism, as he clearly was in his own time and, by his readings of Galton, Huxley, Haeckel and others, with his full knowledge.

The biggest irony of the cult of Charles Darwin among those who believe themselves to be paragons of intellectual life is that, in the arguments I've had on this issue, I've generally discovered that those who insist on their phony St. Charles Darwin have never read much if anything he wrote.  They couldn't possibly have read him and still maintain that he was not an ardent supporter of Galton's developing eugenics, or of Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme exposition of it within his materialist monist system.

Creationists, both in their primitive form and in those who pursue the idea of intelligent design as a scientific proposition, have done that, they've poured over the record left by Charles Darwin, his family and associates and his followers, and have discovered the same quotes, the same absolutely solid case that Charles Darwin is absolutely tied to eugenics and its legacy only means that that record has been there and always will be.   They are nothing if not dedicated to discovering any ammunition that is provided to them by Darwin and his friends. There is nothing illegitimate or unfair in their honest use of that record, though some have distorted it, a sin they share with many of his supporters.  Charles Darwin's own words are there for anyone to read, to understand and to comment on.  Having read him, fully, on this charge, that Darwin was a eugenicist, there is no doubt as to his guilt.  There isn't even a reasonable doubt that he might not have been.

To the extent that evolutionary science keeps Charles Darwin as its figure head, it will find he's a political liability. The denial of his record in regard to eugenics is a lie, it is unworthy of people pretending to uphold science and the truth, the result of denying that record is a failed PR campaign, a trade mark that doesn't work with most people.  The best the Darwin Fan Club can hope for is a slight mitigation to what that record shows.   If they continue to deny that record, they certainly don't do anything for evolutionary science,  I'd guess the Darwin cult is more likely to impede progress than to help it.  To the extent they insist on keeping their artificial Darwin,  it is a good indication of how much more they value ideology instead of science.

Note:  I have not discussed Charles Darwin saying that Emma Darwin, his wife, read him Hereditary Genius, probably during one of Darwin's many bouts of illness, and that she seems, according to her husband, to be interested in Galton's earliest eugenics as well [Why wouldn't she, much of the substance of the book glories in the "hereditary genius" of the Darwin-Wedgewood family which both of the Darwins and Galton came from.] I haven't looked at her diaries to see if she said anything about that, herself.   I have never read anyone taking note of her in relation to eugenics in the last six years of looking into this question.


*  Perhaps the same article that Galton cites as early eugenics material in his Memoir.

**  I will be citing Leonard Darwin in the next part of this series.  Leonard Darwin's repeated statement that in his eugenics promotion he is carrying on his father's work is probably the strongest witness up to and into the period of WWII linking his father to Nazi eugenics.  In nothing I have read by anyone else is that claim denied, especially not in any of the things I read from others, certainly not many by that date, who knew Charles Darwin in the flesh and as closely as his own son would have.  His authority to make that connection is unsurpassed and can never be overcome by the claims of those who never knew the man or talked with him.

***  I will contend that eugenics is gaining traction in a future post.  That is what makes this important.

****  This will also figure importantly later in this series.  It is important to note that Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who is considered the co-discoverer, I would say co-inventor, of the theory of natural selection, vehemently denounced eugenics as pseudo-scientific and the meddling of "an arrogant scientific priestcraft".   So, the idea that natural selection necessarily leads to eugenics is clearly false, though it seems to more often than not.  I am unaware of anyone of the authority of Wallace on this topic who was not a full-blown eugenics supporter who did not consider it scientifically factual.  He is, decidedly, an outlier on this topic.  I might get around to giving my theory of why Wallace's thought on that question developed so differently than did the Darwin side, almost unanimous in the pre-WWII period of eugenics and biology.   I will repeat, I have never found anyone from before the end of WWII and the exposure of the eugenic crimes of the Nazis who claimed that eugenics had nothing to do with natural selection, Darwinism or Charles Darwin.

Hate Mail - When Truth Is An Ideological Pose and A Game Piece

The conceit of scientism, that science is the sole source of truth is obviously untrue because that central holding of scientism isn't a scientific statement.  As with the materialism that is held along with scientism, it has the distinctly discrediting property that it can only be true if it is false.  That so many within science (and sci-groupies who don't have the chops to be sci-guys but want to be mistaken as them) would be true-believers in such absurd and incoherent dogmas (while they claim to hate dogmas) is evidence to their non-mastery of logical rigor.

History is only one area of human endeavor which, unlike much of science, can produce absolute knowledge.  So can other areas of rigorous study.  We can know with absolute certainty the date of Hitler invading Poland, we can know with absolute certainty the date and time of both of the 9-11s that Terry Eagleton mentioned in that lecture I posted yesterday morning, the first, the Nixon sponsored overthrowing of the Allende Government in Chile, three decades before the second one, the airplane-bombing of the World Trade Center.  We can know that more people were murdered in the first than murdered in the second one.

In answer to the objection that is often heard that Charles Darwin had no responsibility for eugenics (which, following on the criminal depravity it produced in the United States, Canada and elsewhere inspired the Nazi genocides) is that we know he bore responsibility for it, exactly and directly through his theory of natural selection.  I've pointed that out many times before.  We have the absolute authorities in determining that responsibility, authorities who can definitively make that attribution beyond any honest question,  Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics and his cousin, Charles Darwin.  They had the unique and absolute authority to make that connection, and they did.

Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics, said that his science was absolutely founded on his cousin's innovation of natural selection and that it was reading the book in which Darwin set out that theory On the Origin of Species, which inspired him to develop eugenics.

We also know that Darwin didn't reject the honor, as Galton would have it,  of having inspired eugenics because he sent his cousin a letter praising what Galton said was the first of his books elucidating eugenics,*  Hereditary Genius (see the link).  We also know that after he sent that letter, in his second major book on the subject of natural selection, Charles Darwin repeatedly cited Hereditary Genius and the two earlier articles in Macmillan's Magazine which Galton documented were the fountainhead of his science, eugenics.*   That is something which neither man ever retracted during their lifetimes and which no post World War Two claims of Darwin's innocence has the power to retract on their behalf.   That lie which I as most college educated Americans and Brits were taught in the post-war period is an obvious lie that can be known is a lie by anyone who reads the relevant writings of Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, as well as things written by such people as Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and probably his earliest biographer and Leonard Darwin who repeatedly said that his work in eugenics was carrying on his father's work, something which no subsequent denial can honestly overcome, though it can overcome by the methods of public relations and other forms of lying.

I am fascinated by how something which literally no one in the pre-WWII era ever denied was so quickly turned into that ubiquitous lie after the war, a lie which those champions of truth and scientism and materialism, scientists had such a huge hand in peddling and how many who could have made the effort of reading Galton's memoirs, Darwin's The Descent of Man and his letters, which began to be published in quantity soon after his death (Francis Darwin was probably the first to do that) and all of the other testimony from those who knew him. 

I think that a lot of the methods of lying that have become the major danger to democracy and any decency in the world were pioneered by such liars lying such lies, using the professional methods of lying that were developed by the advertising industry and which were used, so successfully, by the Nazis and Stalinists and Maoists, Putinists and Trumpists.   The Nazis and Marxists, as do the materialists and devotees of scientism claim they have science on their sides, when they obviously don't.  Science is as dependent on people telling the truth as history or any other human endeavor, including the religion they despise.  Putin, Trump, not even having the vestiges of morality - something washed away by materialism, high-brow and vulgar, don't care as long as they get to steal everything and stay in power to do that. 

People who wonder how Trump suckered people without education (they never consider the people with college degrees who voted for Trump in higher percentages than for Clinton) when they buy their own preferred lies.   I doubt my most persistent troll really cares about how the Nazi genocides happened or he'd be interested in what the actual record of those who produced the genocide said were their motives.  He - like most allegedly educated Americans - only knows he's routing for the atheist, anti-Christian team, which is what so much of the "real" left, the play-left consists of.  It's only a game and in a game truth is irrelevant.

*  In fact, in the book Francis Galton notes that Charles Darwin cited that even earlier manifestation of his eugenics before Galton published Hereditary Genius and that Galton took encouragement from that earliest endorsement by Darwin:

I am aware that my views, which were first published four years ago in Macmillan's Magazine (in June and August 1865), are in contradiction to general opinion; but the arguments I then used have been since accepted, to my great gratification, by many of the highest authorities on heredity. In reproducing them, as I now do, in a much more elaborate form, and on a greatly enlarged basis of induction, I feel assured that, inasmuch as what I then wrote was sufficient to earn the acceptance of Mr. Darwin (“Domestication of Plants and Animals,” ii. 7), the increased amount of evidence submitted in the present volume is not likely to be gainsaid.

I am certain that a good deal of Charles Darwin's acceptance of his cousin, Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius may have been colored by Galton's use of their shared family history on the Darwin side, both of them were grandsons of the earlier evolutionary theorist, Erasmus Darwin (see the book) as an example of "hereditary genius".  I can only imagine what side-comments were made as Darwin's cousin-wife, Emma, read those sections of the book to him or what his son, George Darwin said in that regard as he recommended the book to his father (see Darwin's letter at the first link above).

The entire phenomenon of the idea of natural selection owes a lot of its acceptance in the presumed good-news it is for people who believe it marks them as superior, ordained so by nature.  Its use in promoting class, racial, ethnic and, irrationally enough, gender inequality is no accident, it is intrinsic to how it became so universally promoted among those who had been to college and those who want to be mistaken as scientifically informed and up to date.  Its ideological use is, I am convinced, the major reason it is retained through every twisting, turning modification of it to mean whatever the person citing it wants it to mean.  It is the weirdest scientific theory I've ever looked closely at in that regard.  Popper's legitimate accusation, retracted under massive pressure, that natural selection is obviously tautological is hardly its biggest problem, it is that it has meant entirely different things over its long history.

I am intending to go into my fascination with the corrosion of the value of the truth by materialism more using other irrationalities of common received wisdom.

Update:  I always try to look up citations by authors to check what they're talking about, so I looked up the citation by Galton in Hereditary Genius and found that Darwin did, indeed, express total confidence in even the earliest works that Galton named in the genesis of eugenics.

Some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which genius and talent depend, are inherited, even when both parents are thus endowed. But he who will read Mr. Galton's able paper(11) on hereditary talent will have his doubts allayed.

Unfortunately it matters not, as far as inheritance is concerned, how injurious a quality or structure may be if compatible with life. No one can read the many treatises12 on hereditary disease and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, Omnes Græci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent. of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity runs in families, and some of the cases given by Mr. Sedgwick are awful,—as of a surgeon, whose brother, father, and four paternal uncles were all insane, the latter dying by suicide; of a Jew, whose father, mother, and six brothers and sisters were all mad; and in some other cases several members of the same family, during three or four successive generations, have committed suicide. Striking instances

11 'Macmillan's Magazine,' July and August, 1865.

Reading that two things strike me, one is the only time he mentions the nationality of the people in the paragraph was "of a Jew".   The second is that it reminds me of how much of the deputed scientific evidence that Darwin depended on has more of the quality of gossip used to reinforce preexisting beliefs than of any kind of rigorous examination to determine the actual cause of an event.  Of course, it's so much easier to assert that the causes of such things are biological, discounting things such as being driven crazy by living in a terrible situation, still a mainstay of Darwinian claims not only within but, as concerns my purpose, within the human population.

A Linked Bibliography

For those who want to see, for themselves, that Darwin was a racist, the inspiration of eugenics and probably Ernst Haeckel's most famous supporter and endorser.

The Descent of Man  by Charles Darwin

Note:  As well as copious examples of clear racism by Charles Darwin in the book, he also praises and cites works by Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel,  W. R. Greg and others who are uncontroversially noted to be racists.

Works praised and cited by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man

Hereditary Genius  by Francis Galton

Note:  This is the seminal work of eugenics,  praised by Charles Darwin in a letter to Francis Galton (see chapter XX of Galton's memoir listed below) and cited with extravagant praise by Darwin in The Descent of Man.

The History of Creation,   English translation of  Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte

Volume one

Volume two

Note:  This overwhelmingly racist book advocating infanticide, murder of disabled people, etc. was translated by E. Ray Lankester c. 1875,  Lankester was a friend and intimate colleague of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.   During the period when he was making his translation, Darwin was lobbying for him to be accepted into the Linnean Society.   Darwin reserves his highest praise for Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichtes,  saying in his introduction that if he had not been far into writing The Descent of Man when he learned of Haeckel's book, he wouldn't have completed it.  His repeated citation of it in the text can be fairly described as gushing.

Also instructive

Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development by Francis Galton

Galton gives the line of his publications that constitutes his creation of eugenics, including Hereditary Genius.

Memories of My Life by Francis Galton

Note:  Chapter XX, in which Galton not only definitively ascribes credit to Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species as inspiring eugenics but also publishes the very enthusiastic letter Darwin sent him on his reading Hereditary Genius.


Freedom in Science and Teaching,  English translation of Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre  by Ernst Haeckel

Note:  Thomas Huxley wrote the introduction to the English translation, Darwin endorsed it saying he agreed with all of it, one imagines including the passage in which Haeckel says that Darwinism applied to human society would produce an aristocratic system instead of democracy.

Also useful, especially in the relationship between Darwin and Haeckel is Francis Darwin's collection of his father's letters with commentary.

Volume two 

The Darwin Correspondence Project has many useful letters from and to Charles Darwin,  though there are many that aren't posted as of yet.

If Darwin disagreed with what any of these authors said  about him and his work in books and articles he is known to have read,  it was up to him to say so.   Unless someone can produce his objections,  his multiple, full throated, endorsements of these authors and their work has to stand as his expressed opinion.   I've read nothing from Darwin, his family members, his professional associates or others who knew him that distanced him from them.

Case Closed

Looking at various comments in the overnight hate mail, it's clear that there is a book that really needs to be written, one which I don't have the resources or time to write but one which is really necessary.  The genealogy of the post-war eugenics-free Darwin myth would be really useful for showing how a blatantly obvious lie could be sold to the so-called educated public of the English speaking world when its refutation was still known to so many who had grown up and been educated before the Second World War.  Not only that but the absolute refutation of that lie is absolutely known and from the most unimpeachable of sources.

As I have written here before, the identification of Charles Darwin's natural selection as published in his book On the Origin of Species as the inspiration of eugenics was made by the man who invented eugenics, the eminent scientific polymath, Francis Galton.   He said so in the most unambiguous manner in Chapter XX of his memoir.

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science… 
... I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.

If you think I pulled a fast one with the ellipsis, go read it for yourself.  In fact, unlike my opponents, I really, very much want everyone to read Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel,  Darwin's family and associates, fully and not in opportunistically clipped form.   And I want them to be read, not as if they were writing texts full of literary devices such as metaphor and veiled meaning but as the straight-forward scientific texts they claimed to be writing.

No one but Francis Galton could identify the origin of eugenics and what inspired its invention, by him*.  Once he made that identification as his cousin's book, that sealed the case for the unalterable relationship between Charles Darwin, natural selection and eugenics.   Eugenics would have no motivating principle were it not for natural selection, in each and every case when some manner of eugenics was proposed, from the 1870s down to today, the idea of natural selection being disrupted in some manner, allowing those of lesser "fitness" to live and reproduce, leading to the general degradation of the human population is the logical (though far from evidenced) foundation of eugenics.

Given the history of eugenics, how various political and philosophical ideologies have adopted the idea in different variations,  I hold that there is a very strong reason to believe that as long as natural selection is the governing dogma of evolutionary biology it can be expected that eugenics proposals will be made.   Considering the rapidity with which those became malignant, violating many of the most basic rights of many and all of the rights of many more, there is no reason to expect that future proposals for eugenics won't include those if not worse ideas, carried out with increased effectiveness due to computers.  The Nazis used tabulation devices in their round-up of those they deemed "unfit", a computerized genocide would certainly be far more scientifically efficient.

So, right there, in absolutely irrefutable terms, we have the inventor telling us that Charles Darwin and his natural selection were the inspiration of eugenics.   Case closed.

But Francis Galton also gave us the first of many pieces of information to prove that Charles Darwin, having read Galton's eugenic ideas, expressed as an extension of Darwin's natural selection, approved of what he saw.   Galton published Charles Darwin's letter saying that, here with Galton's prefatory remarks:

Hereditary Genius made its mark at the time, though subjected to much criticism, no small part of which was captious or shallow, and therefore unimportant. The verdict which I most eagerly waited for was that of Charles Darwin, whom I ranked far above all other authorities on such a matter. His letter, given below, made me most happy. 

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.

3rd December

"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original--and how Well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours most sincerely,

(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"

Note that George Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, finished the book before he did and was quite enthusiastic about it, the same George Darwin who shortly after wrote a magazine article proposing, in light of his father's theory and cousin Galton's research that they start changing the marriage laws to control who could and who couldn't have children, the very essence of involuntary eugenics.  And that when George Darwin's proposal was criticized, his father supported his son's outrageous proposals.

I have pointed out, over and over again, that there is absolutely no evidence, whatsoever, that Charles Darwin disapproved of Francis Galton's or his sons' eugenic assertions, extensions of his own theory of natural selection.  The plain fact, as plain as anyone reading his second major work on evolution, The Descent of Man, repeatedly faces as Charles Darwin, over and over again, not only states the premises of eugenics as hard science but does so while citing Francis Galton's very book and early articles on the topic.   And that is not to mention the far more and plainly proto-Nazi statements of Ernst Haeckel in his book,  Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, translated by Darwin's friend and associate, Ray Lankster as "The History of Creation", including assertions of  the scientific ranking and classification of ethnic and racial groups in a hierarchy of fitness (guess which ones are lower and who is at the top) , the benefits of killing the disabled and the extinction of various, named ethic and racial groups.   All of which Charles Darwin endorsed as hard science, with the citation of Haeckel, in The Descent of Man.

Again, please, don't take my word for it, read Darwin's text, in full and not in cherry picked, quote mined snippets but as found in full, from many neutral and Darwin friendly sources online.   Look at his citations and read what it was he endorsed as science before he died in 1882.  Just about all of them are available online, in unaltered reproductions of the originals, in most cases.

One of the things you gain an appreciation of as you reach old age is how short a period of thirty, fifty, even seventy years can seem when looking back whereas  looking forward it looks like a long time.   There isn't that long a time between Darwin and 1939,   There are 68 years which separate the first publication of The Descent of Man and the beginning of the Nazi genocide.  For most of that time and all of the end of it, Charles Darwin's natural selection was the predominant theory influencing the thinking on those matters which the eugenicists dealt with.  And that includes the Nazi eugenics laws and program which put the ideas of Ernst Haeckel which Darwin endorsed into terms of political and social policy.  If you think that is an outrageous statement, read what Darwin says about the benefits to the survivors and increased fitness of the population from things like infanticide, allowing the "weaker members" of the human population die and of the eventual extinction of unnamed, though implied, ethnic groups and some named ones, citing Ernst Haeckel, in German on every single one which I can recall looking up.  

It took the most appalling ignorance of what Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Darwin's family and his colleagues said, what they wrote as science and serious public discourse to sell the lie that Charles Darwin had nothing to do with eugenics, Social Darwinism and the applications of those in various countries, including Germany, beginning in the period when the Nazis passed the first German eugenics laws and began preparations to begin with the murder of the unfit, a list which includes many of those on the list that Haeckel drew up in the 1870s.   And it also took the silence of many scientists who were alive during the previous decades who knew very well that natural selection and the thinking of Darwin and Darwinists was the root of eugenics.  Yet, today, among the self-defined champions of evidence, truth and unflinching reality, it is a piously believed article of faith that Charles Darwin had nothing to do with any of it.

I think there is a lot to be learned from how that whopper of a lie became the common and insisted on dogma of the so-called educated class.  The speed with which it was imposed as the de rigueur line of thinking might give us some clues as to how easy it is to sell a lie to even those most proud of their modern, scientific way of thinking.  I'm not convinced they aren't as easy to sell on a big lie as those they love to look down on, so disdainfully.


*  I will remind you that that is eugenics in the English language,  Leonard Darwin, who was both an expert in his fathers' thinking and a witness to the entire history of active eugenics, noted that in Germany, organized eugenics was begun by Willhelm Schallmeyer before he had read Galton.  He noted that Schallmeyer, like Galton was inspired by his reading of Origin of Species.

The Curiously Dissappeared [mysteriously reappeared] Primary Evidence And Why It Really Does Matter In Real Life

Update:  I don't know if it has anything to do with me posting this, but within an hour after I did, the link I mentioned started working.  Spooky?  Or something else?  Synchronicity?   But I will leave up the introductory passage.

This morning I went looking for the previously available online images and transcripts of letters to and from Charles Davenport which I consulted in preparing my posts on the topic of eugenics and, oddly, none of them seem to be available anymore. Not from the Dolan DNA Learning Center at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, not from various British sources where such things could be found as recently as two years ago.   Not on my computer, not on the computer of one of my siblings which I also tried.

If you google "Charles Davenport Francis Galton letter" you can see some barely legible images of them (as of this morning)  but I can't get links to the legible ones I used to work with. Since beginning this research I've noticed I wasn't the only one who was finding those links, a number of mainstream authors were exposing the record that previously had only been of interest to fundamentalists opposed to the teaching of evolution.  If that has anything to do with why I can't present you with a link to the image of the letters which you could read for yourself,  I can't say.  I can say that the letters exist, they have been read, they do constitute absolute proof of the direct link from the first generation of eugenicists to the American, Canadian and other eugenics programs, including racists such as Davenport who were involved with Nazi eugenics, they aren't going away and their existence and their content isn't deniable except by lying or lying about them.  They shouldn't be disappeared online.   Neither are such published sources as the autobiography of Francis Galton, the biography of him by his student, the eminent geneticist and cold blooded eugenicist Karl Pearson, etc.  While those were ignored or unread, they lay out the same lines of connection that the letters prove.

Whether or not it is liked by those who propped up the post-war misinformation campaign that Michael Shermer was spouting in the interview I linked to yesterday morning,  the links from the Holocaust to Darwin's inner circle are clear and obvious and fully documented by the men, almost all of them scientists, who comprised those multiple and very short chains, going back from Nazis such as Ploetz through those such as Leonard Darwin and Charles Davenport, to the generation of Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton who provides the link to Charles Darwin as his inspiration, publishing the letter Charles Darwin wrote to him expressing his enthusiasm for Galton's first book developing eugenics, Hereditary Genius, a book Charles Darwin cited, as reliable science many times in his second major work on the topic of evolution, The Descent of Man.

The post-war iron curtain erected to separate the Holocaust from the fictional Charles Darwin which was also created at that time, can only be sustained by lies disproved by his words and the words of people who knew him as intimately as his own children and his closest scientific colleagues.  Those words are out, the Darwin Industry should try to live with that and not attempt to continue with the lie.

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In my second post I put up yesterday, I noted that the American biologist Charles Davenport was a direct link between American eugenics and the Nazi eugenics program, which is inseparable from the mass murders of the Holocaust.
That link is undeniable because Davenport left the damning evidence in abundance, as did a large number of other American, British, etc. scientists who were involved in or enthusiastic about eugenics.   I have noted before that in correspondence between Davenport and Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the head of the British Eugenics Society discuss their attempts to promote eugenics in Germany at a time it was widely opposed - in the 1920s - Leonard Darwin doubting they'd succeed because of the "conservatism" of the German scientists.

If that were not enough to prove the case, Davenport provides a direct link directly into Darwin's inner circle through his correspondence with Francis Galton.

My dear Galton:  Your postcard of Oct. 14, just received I thank you for for taking the trouble to reply - You must think me a nuisance to add thus even a letter to your correspondence. But I must tell you of recent events here.

As the enclosed printed matter will show in some detail there has been started here a Record Office in Eugenics. - So you see the seed sown by you is still sprouting in distant countries.   And there is great interest in Eugenics in America,  I can assure you.   We have a plot of ground of 80 acres, near New York City, a house with a fire proof addition for our records.  We have a superintendent, a stenographer and two helpers besides to train field workers.  These are all associated with the Station for Experimental Evolution, which supplies Experimental Evidence of the methods of heredity. We have a satisfactory income for a beginning and have established very cordial relations with institutions.

I want to tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your autobiography.  You have quite put yourself into it;  and that makes it much more valuable than any "Life" by another hand.  It would please you to realize how universal is the recognition in this Country, of your position as the founder of the science of Eugenics.   And, I think, as the years go by, humanity will more and more appreciate its debt to you.   In this country we run "Charity" mad.  Now, a revulsion of feeling is coming about, and people are turning to your teaching.  With best wishes for continued strength and health & expression of my professional esteem,  Yours faithfully,  Chas B. Davenport  (Eugenics Records Office, #2094)

Just as Francis Crick in 1970 was finding eugenic inspiration from Karl Pearson's biography of Galton, the founder of eugenic, Charles Davenport was finding inspiration from Galton's autobiography as he was beginning the campaign of eugenics in America, sixty years earlier.   And Charles Davenport was, actually, a participant in Nazi eugenics, during the Nazi regime.   He was on the editorial board of two German magazines founded during those years to promote the Nazi's eugenics practices, Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde und ihre Nachbargebiete and the Zeitschrift für menschliche Vererbungs- und Konstitutionslehre.  The name of the second one is especially chilling in its English translation,  The Journal for Human Heredity and Constitutional Doctrine.  He had, before the Nazis took power, promoted eugenics in Germany as elsewhere.   I found that information in the book  Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl.   the passage dealing with that is, I think, too willing to still allow the distinction between science and politics that Davenport used to mask his support for the Nazis.

With the topic of eugenics, which was from the beginning a call by scientists to apply their theories to the human population using the force of law, that distinction is a convenient but utterly transparent lie.  As early as 1873 George Darwin*, with the support of his father, wrote  "On Benefical Restriction to Liberty of Marriage," calling for the legal dissolution of marriages on the basis of mental illness, involuntarily, obviously, as his modest proposal included making it impossible for those who regained their mental health to resume those marriages.  Not to mention other pretty horrible ideas.  He noted other eugenicists, such as Greg asserted the "necessity of coercion" even earlier than that.  Again, this was already eugenics, ten years before Galton gave his new science its name.   Eugenics, from the beginning was scientists (even those such as George Darwin, an astronomer not arguably professionally competent in that area) insisting on becoming part of the political and legal processes in order to coerce people to have children only as they approved, insisting their right to determine who should and who should not have children.   As natural selection, the foundation and motivation for eugenics, is founded on the political-economic theories of Malthus, it is ridiculous to pretend that it and its derivations are separable from politics.  That alone makes its casual acceptance as a basis for activity in human life ripe for disaster.

*  George Darwin had read Galtons' Hereditary Genius before his father and in his congratulatory letter to Galton, Charles Darwin noted his son's enthusiasm for it.   As I noted in one of my posts, Francis Darwin, in his early biography- letter collection his and George's father, Charles Darwin, noted that George Darwin's articles were "eugenics".

Update:  While I am entirely opposed to teaching creationism in public schools as science, it's a pathetically poor excuse to pretend this evidence doesn't exist if creationists were the ones who first noticed what it means.   If we're supposed to favor teaching evolution BECAUSE IT'S TRUE, BECAUSE IT'S WHAT REALLY HAPPENED,  then the same standard makes exposing the documentary and historical record of these scientists just as much of a virtue for the very same reason.   Lying about that record is as much a denial of reality as insisting that the diversity of life came about on the first six days of a little over six thousand years.   See my posts mentioning Paul Feyerabend several days ago about low standards of scholarship acceptably practiced among those who wrap themselves in the mantle of "the enlightenment".

Notice of Intent

Following a long blog brawl at Sandwalk blog, that has extended into two comment threads and more than a week, I'm planning on writing on Charles Darwin's role in inspiring eugenics and Social Darwinism in the English speaking people and Germany.

The current belief common on the left is that Charles Darwin, somehow, had no role in inspiring eugenics and nothing to do with Social Darwinism.   Until about six years ago, it was a belief I shared,  a belief based mostly in my never having read much of the primary source material from Darwin, Francis Galton and others relevant to those issues.   Then, I decided to write on that topic on the blog I was writing for.   I expected to find the documentary record would support that contention of a eugenics-free Darwin who was greatly wronged and sullied by the distortion of his thinking that Social Darwinism represents.  Only, as soon as I started looking at that record,  The Descent of Man  by Charles Darwin,  Memories of My Life by Francis Galton,  that sanitized Charles Darwin began to fall apart.   I found that Galton explicitly credited his cousin Charles Darwin and, specifically,  On the Origin of Species as inspiring  his eugenics.   He published the letter from Darwin, gushing enthusiasm for Galton's book "Hereditary Genius".    In Descent of Man, I found glowing endorsement for Galton's book and other publications,  I found that Darwin, far from disdaining Herbert Spencer, the counterpart of Galton in Social Darwinism, he called him a "great philosopher".   Most disturing of all, I found a lot of similarly glowing endorsements of Ernst Haeckel and his publications, some of which I was somewhat familiar with as they are infamous in the history of German scientific racism and, again, eugenics.

Since that shock I've looked at the record even more, always depending on primary documents, in the words of Charles Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, and others, including, soon after, Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, himself an infamous figure in eugenics and Francis Galton's successor in British eugenics. Leonard Darwin, who seems to be reticient about mentioning his father, leaving that to others, nevertheless, associated his father with his own eugenics and, in a really stunning article, cited his father's role as the independent inspiration of German eugenics.

Early in the effort I realized that in order to overcome those primary documents there would have to be documents from Charles Darwin, himself, or others as closely associated with Charles Darwin as his own children (three other sons and other Darwins were active in eugenics) who distanced him from eugenics.   That is something I've never found, every step of the way I've found only that those who knew Charles Darwin had, personally, associated him with eugenics. Eugenicists who never knew Darwin cited him as part of their inspiration.   I have, yet,  come across no eugenicists who have disassociated Charles Darwin from eugenics.

I have not found any self-defined Darwinists who did that before World War II ended, when, I greatly suspect, the eugenics free Charles Darwin began to be constructed in an effort to rehabilitate him.   Before then, eugenics was controversial but it was also one of the most remarkable and rapid success stories of a new "science" in history.   Eugenics was adopted in intellectual circles, university science departments, textbooks and, most of all, by legislatures and courts.  Before the war, it wasn't uncommon for people opposed to eugenics to be seen as ignorant and backwards, science deniers.

After the Nazis and their allies showed what eugenics really meant when put into practice, after the eugenics programs in the United States and Canada started to come under more scrutiny and their deplorable violations of rights became known,  eugenics went from a success for Darwinism in real life to a mill stone around the neck of evolutionary biology.

Instead of de-eugenicizing (as it were) evolutionary science, for largely ideological reasons unrelated to the science, the science establishment and others with an ideological interest in the reputation of Charles Darwin started to construct a sanitized version of the man and his work.  It was that sanitized Darwin who was presented to me along with other phonied up substitutes for history, such as Inherit the Wind.   I bought pretty much all of it until six years ago when I started doing what I should have done before forming opinions on the subject, reading the actual record left by those who the secondary records and tertiary junk are supposed to be based on.

After that long argument on Sandwalk blog, an argument begun with an attack on me by another participant as I was discussing the topic of the post, I've had enough.   I will be acting as the devil's advocate in the case for the canonization of Charles Darwin in several planned posts.  I'm an internal critic of that, accepting that evolution is a fact, as proven a fact as exists in the biological and, perhaps as Gould contended,  in all of science.   That doesn't mean that I don't expect any of the legion of true believers in the cause of St. Darwin won't lie about that.  But I'm not going to be intimidated into lying about it anymore by those tactics.

"but I want to justify natural selection to you" - Hate Mail

There is no debating as to whether or not Karl Pearson was a major figure in mainstream Darwinism or science, as was his teacher Francis Galton.  For that we have the testimony of no one more than Charles Darwin who endorsed Galton's eugenics and other conclusions Galton drew from the theory of natural selection and so confirmed Galton's authority on the matter.  Francis Galton was still alive and working when his prize student gave the lecture published as National Life From The Standpoint of Science.  There is no evidence I found that he disagreed with that and the other equally putrid conclusions Pearson came to from mainstream Darwinism.  He trusted Pearson to the extent that he named him as his official biographer. 

If you haven't read much of the literature of the first generation of Darwinists,  starting with Charles Darwin, going to those scientists he cited most glowingly to support natural selection, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, you might be surprised at the excerpt I typed out below to prove my point that even a renowned socialist, though a British mainstream, Fabian socialist, would present conclusions from the theory of natural selection that are indistinguishable from Nazi discourses of two to four decades after he presented this.  He sounds exactly like today's neo-Nazis with a better writing style .  Starting on page 21.

What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man.  How many centuries, how many thousand of years, have the Kaffir or the negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man?   Yet their intertribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the last comparable with the Aryan.  Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock.  History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.  If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection do to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended.

If you bring the white man into contact with the black, you too often suspend the very process of natural selection on the evolution on which the evolution of a higher type depends.  You get superior and inferior races living on the same soil, and that coexistence is demoralizing for both.  They naturally sink into the position of master and servant, if not admittedly or covertly into that of slave-owner and slave.  Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered.  Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans.  Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed;  instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future.  Such problems in suspense, it appears to me, are to be found in the negro population of the southern States of America, in the large admixture of Indian blood in some of the South American races, but, above all, in the Kaffir factor in south Africa.  

You may possibly think that I am straying from my subject, but I want to justify natural selection to you.  I want you to see selection as something which renders the inexorable law of heredity a source of progress which produces the good through suffering, an infinitely greater good which far outbalances the very obvious pain and evil.  Let us suppose the alternative were possible.  Let us suppose we we could prevent the white man, if we liked, from going to lands of which the agricultural and mineral resources are not worked to the full;  then I should say a thousand times better for him that he should not go than that he should settle down and live alongside the inferior race.  The only healthy alternative is that he should go and completely drive out the inferior race.  That is practically what the white man has done in North America.  We sometimes forget the light that chapter in history throws on more recent experiences.  Some 250 years ago there was a man who fought in our country against taxation without representation, and another man who did not mind going to prison for the sake of his religious opinions.  As Englishmen we are proud of them both, but we sometimes forget that they were both considerable capitalists for their age, and started charted compaines in another continent.  Well, a good deal went on in the plantations they founded, if not with their knowledge with that at least of their servants and of their successors, which would shock us all at the present day.  But I venture to say that no man calmly judging will wish either that whites had never gone to America, or would desire that whites and Red Indians were to-day living alongside each other as negro and white in the Southern States, as Kaffir and European in South Africa, still less that they had mixed thier blood as Spaniard and Indian in South America.  The civilization of the white man is a civilization dependent upon free white labour, and when that element of stability is removed it will collapse like those of Greece and Rome.  I venture to assert, then, that the struggle for existence between white and red man, painful and even terrible as it was in its details, has given us a good far outbalancing its immediate evil.   In place of the red man, contributing practically nothing to the work and thought of the world, we have a great nation, mistress of many arts, and able, with its youthful imagination and fresh, untrammeled impulses, to contribute much to the common stock of civilized man.  Against that we have only to put the romantic sympathy for the Red Indian generated by the novels of Cooper and the poems of Longfellow, and then - see how little it weighs in the balance!

This differs in no way from the Nazi's theory of Lebensraum except that in their case it was white Europeans they killed instead of the inhabitants of The Americas.  AND THAT IS NO KIND OF MORAL DISTINCTION OF ANY KIND UNLESS YOU ARE A RACIST.   Nor, in fact, does it differ from Charles Darwin's own declarations on the great boon to the world that white men, especially Brits, going around the world doing what Pearson got his Aryan rocks off over in this scientific poison, killing entire racial groups and stealing their land and resources.  You can hear the drooling enthusiasm for murder in his elegant Victorian prose.

Apparently, from the Appendices of the published volume, Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son was in the audience of a similar proto-Nazi talk by Pearson.  In the notes on the discussion it says:

From our standpoint we are forced to realize that in judging of social conduct - e.g. - of the suitability of persons for charity, etc., we should be particular in inquiring concerning ancestry.  Pity and help the weak, but remember that it is a national evil when any charitable or social institution allows the indefinite multiplication of the unfit in mind or body.  

In all social work and in all legislative action true progress is impossible if the reformer and the legislator do not know and pay attention to the principles of heredity.

Major L. (Leonard) Darwin moved a vote of thanks to Professor Pearson, and said his own interest in the subject was inherited;  and he gave an emphatic warning against the evils which may, without care, result from the present movement for educating defective children.  The danger was lest their education, by making their departure from the ordinary standard less obvious should make it possible for them to marry and hand on their defects of mind and body to their descendants.  

Just less than thirty-five years later, on the outbreak of World War Two, Leonard Darwin was still lauding the great progress, the great turn of German thought to the right direction since the Nazis instituted Darwinian principles in eugenic policy. You might note at the link, that Leonard Darwin, corresponding with Karl Pearson, said he was carrying on his father's work in his eugenics.  There was and is no one with a higher standing to make that claim than Leonard Darwin, it is a definitive attribution.

Really, since I started this stuff more than a decade ago, I've found that I could open literally any writing of any of the major figures in the history of Darwinism, including those who knew Darwin personally and I could almost predict the depravity I would find which was explained as scientific fact on the basis of the theory of natural selection.   Natural selection has always and will always generate these kinds of claims.  It is inherent to the theory.

It is an irony that today's Republican-fascist party which contains so many bitter opponents of Darwinism that they, nevertheless, fully endorse the entire thing, natural selection, innate biological inequality,  in so far as this kind of stuff is concerned.  It's no more ironic, though, than that lefties who believe themselves to be champions of racial equality and the like turned the originator of this kind of proto-Nazism as science into a demi-god of secular, atheist, modernism.   Especially when those lefties are Marxists.   Karl Marx had an entirely more skeptical and critical view of it than they do. 

Update:  I forgot, I strongly suspect that one of those Englishmen of old that Pearson mentioned must have been William Penn, the founder of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania.   I can only imagine what he would have thought of being mentioned in such a putrid document, it is impossible to imagine he would have consented to being used for such an evil purpose.