Part Three: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

0:00Oh my goodness, I didn't see you walk into the internet where I don't ever see you. And you don't really see me unless you're watching the Netflix. So I guess actually quite a few of you do so anyway, this is behind the bastards, this is podcasts, but the very worst people in all of history. You know that, this is the second week that we're going to be covering Francis Galton, the man who invented racism. It's probably the flippant title I'm going to use for the episode. He's really the guy who invented eugenics and a bunch of fun math stuff and shit. We'll talk about some of that too, but it's less interesting than the horrible things he did, which is certainly the most notable part of his life. Speaking of people who did horrible, no, David Bell, you don't do horrible things, do you? No, I've had a big, since, oh man, since we last record, I got a second chair, you see my second chair. Oh, I do. It looks exactly like the chair I'm sitting in. And I went to the six flags that kills people. Oh, great. You know the one that's been like giving people coma's and stuff, I went to it.

1:02Oh, yeah. It was like a specific brain stuff, right? Yeah, it was not crowded. It was great. That's good. That's the smart way. Once there's a scandal, that's the right time to go to an amusement park. Yeah. Like after Schlitterbond to capitated that kid. That's when you go. That's when you go. That's when you go to Schlitterbond, yeah. Exactly. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grownups. A-B-C-D. In the morning, brush your teeth. A-B-C-D. In the morning, brush your teeth. A-F-G-H. Hurry up and don't be late. A-F-G-H. Hurry up and don't be late.

2:20You're getting both in every sip. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target. This weekend, the Monster Energy SMX World Championship playoffs race into Los Angeles. This is it. It's all the line. Now the pressure is on to deliver. And for the world's best 22 dirt bike racers, only one will go home number one. If all comes down to this, go experience all of the action live. Coming to Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles, California this weekend, get your tickets now at supermodovross.com. Never wanted to try an Olympic and Paralympic sport? Try Fencing. It's fast, competitive, and even offered at the NCAA level. Find a beginner class near you at TryFencing.org. That's TryFencing.org. Well, probably time we get back to Francis Galton. Unfortunately, yeah.

3:20Let's get back. So we had left off in the 1870s. Francis has invented the term eugenics and has started spreading it around English society. He's going from this point on. He's going to keep writing books about eugenics and published scientific papers. But he's also constantly throughout this period. He's writing news articles and opinion columns. He's suggesting laws. He's going to be throughout this as his understanding and beliefs about eugenics evolve constantly trying to push society to adopt legal like schema around based on his ideas. Like that is from the beginning, like a major focus for Galton. In 1874, he published a new book, English Men of Science, Their Nature and Nurture. In this book, he did the same thing he always does where he looks at like the guys he considers imminent and then tries to figure out like how many kids did they find and like what families did they come from? So he asked, right, this time he was scientists and he asked like 190 fellows from the

4:21Royal Society of Science to send back like self-reported data about their families and their education and like 100 of them did roughly. And his goal was to try to figure out the relative impact of nature versus nurture, right? Look at what the scientists say about like what inspired them and made them become great scientists and try to figure out how much is, you know, heredity play into scientific genius and how much is like just how you raise people, right? And this is why Galton becomes if you've all heard the term like nature versus nurture we're all familiar with that concept. Galton is the first guy to name it, right? Not that people hadn't wondered about this before, but nature versus nurture using those specific words to discuss that comes from France's Galton. His biographer Michael Bolwer suspects that Galton took the phrase itself from a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest where Prospero calls his adopted son Caliban, quote, a devil, a born devil on whose nature nurture can never stick.

5:21Now one thing Galton found as he goes through the self-reported backstories of these scientists is that first sons are twice as likely to become scientists as youngest sons, right? They're like way likelier. And Galton accurately credits this to the advantage of nurture. Obviously there's not like a genetic reason that the first son is going to be better at science. These are because of like social things, right? There are, there are, and he concludes basically, well, first sons, obviously they get more resources. It's a period of time in which like legally if you're the first son, you pretty much have to inherit most of what you're, if not everything that your dad has, right? Like, that's a big part of like what colonialism is second and third sons need something to do to go make their fortune. So they go to the colonies or something, right? First, first born is like you're putting all your resources into it. Yeah. You're taking it to swing. If you screw it up, you can make another like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's the first it's a seed you don't need. You don't need to have that there.

6:22Yeah, exactly, right? And so, you know, to, to Galton's credit, he sees like, well, obviously this is a nurture sort of thing in a major way, right? Like that, like that specific aspect of the fact that first sons are more likely to be famous scientists comes down to nurture. But rather than generalizing that and being like, wow, well, if that major thing, like, if, if, if nurture like had such an impact there to where like first sons are twice as likely to become scientists, maybe nurture has like a lot to do with whether or not people get into science, right? Maybe that's like as important as heredity and more important in some ways, right? But he ignores the implication that he completely bleak breezes past this, right? He acknowledges like, oh, well, that one's down to nurture and then continues to basically generalize it like, but nurture really means nothing at all pretty much, right? Part of why he concludes this is that based on the self purported, reported data, 56 of the 91 men who responded to him said that they believed they had an innate skill and interest in science and only 11 of these great scientists did not report having an innate

7:26skill, right? So that's very scientific. Very scientific data. Right, super scientific. You see, like, asking people on the great scientists. Yeah. Born. Yeah. Right. So he, as he's like looking into these different great scientists, he concludes obviously, well, if most of them say that they had an innate skill, that means that like, that's further evidence for what I believe that heredity has everything to do with intelligence and success. And you know, you can see how sloppy his work is just looking into the case of one of the scientists that responded to him, his cousin, Charles Darwin, because Darwin classified as scientific interest as innate. But when he was asked to like, well, where does the origin of your interest in your specific branch of science come from? He's like, well, was the voyage I took on the beagle, right? Like, I would not have gotten interested into like heredity and natural selection stuff. Like, that was all because of this thing that falls under nurture, right? Like, I happen to be in a position to go on this voyage. And that's what spurred my particular interest in this branch of science, which again, I think

8:27someone more open-minded would be like, well, this is perfect evidence of how there's both nature and nurture, you know, playing together here. Like Darwin had an innate interest in science that had probably always was going to be with him, but also specific elements of his life and the opportunities he had heavily influenced the kind of scientist he became and made sure he was in a position to make his great discovery, right? Like, nurture, you know, what we would call just like blind luck, I guess in a lot of ways, had a lot to do with that, right? Yeah, it's like if you have like a sort of analytical mind or a specific personality that was brought on by genetic traits, you might gravitate towards this thing that then like, if your parents are also doing that thing already, like you could have just easily gotten into something similar, but not the same exact thing. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's a combination of the two factors. Right. Like, I would be, it would be very silly of me to be like, well, either to be like, well, I just worked hard.

9:27And so that's how like I wound up as a successful writer. And it would also be silly for me to be like, well, my dad was pretty good at writing and had a nice voice. And so like, that's why I wound up as a pot. Yeah, both of those things had something to do with it, right? Like, it's always a mix of like nature and nurture that contributes to this. But Galton has this habit of like really, even when he has to acknowledge like the massive impact that like nurture, so to speak, has on someone like his cousin Charles, he just kind of blazes past it. He never draws broader conclusions. Just like he never draws broader conclusions from the fact that like his big sister who was disabled also was a really smart person who massively contributed to his intellectual development. And maybe that means people who are disabled have value in society, right? Right. Like he can't, he just doesn't, he refuses to generalize. It's not even a can't thing. And yeah, a bowl or a, sorry, bowl where Galton's biographer adds about his sort of analyses of these different scientific self reports.

10:28Furthermore, if one of the parents had scientific tastes, Galton took this as evidence of heredity, but he had no way of distinguishing heredity from encouragement at home, whose importance was acknowledged by one third of the respondents. So even where his respondents are like, well, yeah, my parents like really pushed me to be a scientist and made sure I had good education. And that probably led me to my field. Like he, he just kind of like breezes past it, right? He, he calls, considers that heredity. They're like, well, if your parents like science and encourage you to be a scientist, that's heredity as opposed to like, well, anyone could do that, right? Like, they don't have to be like. Based off of, again, him just, it's like he's doing science like a YouTuber does science. Right. He's just asking people what they think they are a scientist. Like why do you think you're a scientist, which is a very, a very shitty starting place. And then he's just sort of hand waving even when they say things that are against the thing he wants. Yeah. He does that a lot when there's a data point that contradicts him. He'll acknowledge it in the paper and then ignore it in his conclusions because it's

11:31inconvenient, right? One of the main things that separates Galton from Darwin, a Galton, sorry, one of the main things that separates Galton and Darwin from their critics at this period of time, the people who are like attacking eugenics and don't agree with him is not that they have a differing understanding of genetics and heredity because nobody really has a good understanding of genetics and heredity at this point quite yet. But what really separates Galton and Darwin from their critics is this, they have a differing belief in whether or not nature and nurture matters. Like Darwin gets convinced by Galton that nurture means basically nothing. And Galton is a vocal advocate of the idea that like helping out poor kids, giving them more money and more food, better schools, that'll do nothing. Like they're fucked from the start because they have bad genes, right? How can we be? That's basically called Zadiky, called Zaditude. But there are critics of this. One of the most vocal critics of early eugenics was Alfred Russell Wallace. Alfred was a biologist who independently, he's the co-creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

12:32He and Darwin independently came to it at the same time and published like at the same time. He just is a lot less well known. Darwin was way better at the PR and the things, right? And got famous. But Russell, Alfred Russell Wallace is just as brilliant as scientists. Again, like he's recognized today as the, and at the time was recognized as someone who would come up with this independently. And he wasn't some ways to superior scientists to Darwin because he became an immediate enemy of eugenics, right? Galton comes up with eugenics and tells his cousin and Darwin's like, oh yeah, that sounds completely right. I'm a bigot now. I mean, he, he, not that he hadn't before. But Alfred Russell Wallace reads Galton's theories and he's like, well, that's fucking crazy. And he writes an article warning them, quote, the world does not want the eugenicists to set it straight. Give the people good conditions, improve their environment and all will tend towards the highest type eugenics is simply the medicine interference of an arrogant scientific priest craft. And I really like that phrasing that like you are pretending to be like a man of science

13:36in an atheist, but all you have done is create like a secular religion and to point yourself basically the Pope. That's what Galton has, has turned himself into. He is now like the high priest of this increasingly popular secular faith in heredity and the ability and they're kind of both they're sort of apocalyptic and also they're like, you know, utopian sort of heaven vision is that you can breed a perfect society of people who will live longer and not have ever have any problems with violence and make beautiful brilliant art and be like, perfect, right? We can make perfect special boys forever. That's the, that's the dream like, like future that eugenics is promising and that Galton is, you know, turning himself into a height man for effectively. And I think that calling him a scientific priest does get, because there's an element of this guy when you read him, he sometimes sounds like a coat leader or like a madman like there's there's some really crazy quotes from some of his writing like here's a segment from hereditary talent and character published in 1865.

14:39The power of man of a random life and producing whatever varieties of form he pleases is enormously great. The dream is though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder's will. It is might as I are to show more pointedly than so far as I'm aware has been attempted before that mental qualities are equally under control, right? The future generations are just like clay, they're putty in our hands. We can mold them perfectly to whatever we want, right? That's crazy person talk. That's like, oh yeah, that's nice movie villain shit. Yeah, man scientist shit, right? Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of people are into it by the 1870s or so, Galton had become well convinced and argued to much popular acclaim that the native peoples of colonized lands must either be bred like livestock to enhance their positive traits or in the case of certain peoples who are at the lowest level of his racial hierarchy should be bred out of existence. Extension was the goal. Why are people into this? Because it's like someone being like that we're all slopping in the future, we can breathe

15:41like perfect people. It's so weird for any of you. Yeah, that's right. Down with us, you know, they're not saying down with us. He's speaking because his audience, I think this is important to get Dave because you've brought up that that's he's not writing for an audience that would think of it like you publish an article and it's there for like all of the people who read, right? Who are interested in it or whatever and want to he is writing specifically for the very tiny number of people who are both like can read and are educated scientists. He's writing for gentleman in his own country. Rich honkies. Yeah, rich honkies and what he's saying is that like us and people like us are the pinnacle of human beings so far and we're the only ones who really should be breeding and we can be better like our generate our dissents will be even better than us if we get good at this, but we're the special ones. And so like we need to restrict everyone else from breeding because we've got it right. We've got culture right and society and like everything like philosophy right and there's no other value in anyone who does anything differently in any societies or cultures that

16:45are different. They need to be extinguished because this is the only actual way to live, right? There's always been I mean conservatism always has an element of this in it of like well there's one right way to do things and kind of eugenics is taking that to the absolute most absurd extent which is like there's only one right way to be a human being genetically right? That's what's going on here. That's who galtons how galtons pitching it you know. And while that you know obviously at the time they have very medical sciences is much more primitive they like there's not any real ability to like do a mass sterilization campaign and he's not advocating that yet, but he is advocating for the extinction of inferior peoples and his plan for this initially is to move superior people into the area and incentivize them financially and legally to outbreed the others, right? Like this is why he wants to send Chinese people to Africa to replace black people because he is there higher up on the racial list you know. It's like the it's like this is like adjacent to people who cry about white genocide right

17:49where like oh yeah this is what comes from yeah when I heard the term white genocide yeah I was like what wait what do they think is happening and I and and so I like looked into it and looked into what these people think is the problem and they're just describing this gradual thing where cultures will just mix and mingle in a very positive way and it was like oh so like just basic progress and this sounds like people kind of proposing the opposite right where they're like yeah we're not saying that we need to like put people in camps we just need to encourage the opposite of this like you know of race mixing and stuff like that everybody goes back to where they came from or something like that. We certainly because there's not a and he will get more concerned about immigration as it comes on but I'm sure his belief is that like we need to improve the world as a colonial power part of what justifies British colonialism is that we're improving the gene pool right

18:52by ideally getting rid of these inferior peoples and breeding the the peoples the colonized peoples who are like best breeding them for better traits that's what we should be doing we should be gardeners of the human race right that's kind of his initial art that's going to change over time somewhat but that is his initial argument and white genocide I will tell you where that comes from because that also comes out of golden right but he's not okay he's not immediately panicking about that initially he's looking more further he believed that colonialism should do quote the necessary job of replacing inferior peoples with their better because they would stupidly fail to submit to the needs of a superior civilization he was applauded for writing stuff like this because it was what rich British people wanted to hear that they were doing the right thing and in fact they should be even more racist and even worse to the people that they already basically owned and this is what he's giving his peers here is something that colonialism started to need by the end of the 19th century secular moral legitimacy

19:52it was never hard to find Christian justifications for colonialism just as many Christians had used scripture to justify slavery but the problem with this and obviously there's a there's a big justification of like evangelical stuff right of like well we need to colonize these places to spread the one true gospel right like that that's a justification for colonialism but the problem if you're if you're just you can and people do justify colonialism that way but if you're doing that you can't ever really cut out the full text of the Bible and there are always passages in the Bible that you can interpret as justifying you know colonialism and slavery but there's lots of passages that don't right and so there's always going to be a constant stream of Christians who are reformers and critics of colonialism too because you're working from the Bible and a lot of people are always going to read the Bible and be like oh it says you shouldn't actually be shitty to people right right yeah obviously other people interpret it differently but you're always going to have some of those folks if it's based on the Bible and likewise the fairly new ideas of secular humanism

20:55had also fueled critiques of the system right the people who are not like religiously motivated but are early humanists are like I don't know like like seems bad to do slavery seems bad to do colonialism do oppress these people in like their own homes right and what eugenics provided was away from men of science and men of faith who trusted science to argue that racial hierarchy is not cruel but literally written into the laws of heredity and thus any kindness or equality that would allow lower races to reproduce and interbreed is actually cruel because it leads to worse catastrophe in the long term right and so from what we might call an effective altruism standpoint eugenics makes sense you know it's a it's a moral justification that doesn't require Christianity and that sort of allows us to because we're not seeing them as people we don't have to treat them as people right now you've got a scientific justification for that and I know some people might think I'm being unfair by talking about by comparing this to effective altruism right taking a

21:56modern day ideology that on the surface is about maximizing the effective is effective to as a charitable giving and comparing it to eugenics and the reason I am making this comparison is because a ton of modern day effective altruists love arguing that actually everyone really believes in eugenics if you actually think about it right and that's the premise of a post I found on the effective altruism forum from February of 2023 by someone with the account named cinchentist the title was most people endorse some form of eugenics the article started with the case of a German couple Susan Carolusky and Patrick Stubing originally from leapsick Germany here's how the article introduces them Susan and Patrick were a young German couple in love but the German state never allowed Susan and Patrick to get married shockingly Patrick was imprisoned for years because of a sexual relationship with Susan you want to guess what was going on there they look different no there were brother and sister oh it's all back to cousin fucking right right right i did not see that coming no it's it's a crazy

23:02way to introduce an article that is a fact about i mean yeah so like what's happened here is that Patrick and Susan were raised separately they were like their brother and sister but like they were in foster care or something like that and they had multiple children four children in total three of them had severe birth defects and those children are yeah you are eventually taken away in place with a foster family because like the state said that you guys are really irresponsible and this is fucked up and bad right but that's not in this fucking article where he's trying and with this this guy is trying to argue that like enforcing laws against incest is a form of eugenics right that's the that's the argument of this and the the author starts by saying that like yeah okay so they're you know their children were taken away because they had birth defects and you know uh place with a foster family and then the article asks why did Germany do all these terrible things to Susan and Patrick eugenics and first off this author doesn't think eugenics is terrible

24:03and he did like what he is saying is that like this is eugenics and so everyone's okay with some degree of eugenics and that's a red point everybody's on the eugenics spectrum and you are supposed to take from that that like well maybe I should consider other aspects of eugenics more reasonable than I do right and the reality is Germany didn't do this because of eugenics they did this because Patrick and Susan are brother and sister and the relationship is incestuous and that can lead to horrible birth defects and they continued to have kids even after this was known and like they had been warned and that's why Patrick after is like second kid gets sentenced to 10 months in prison now I'm not saying that's good or bad I don't know enough about German law or enough about all of the specifics of this prosecution um but the reason why this author frames the story the way he does is that he's trying to convince everyone that we all support a little eugenics right it's a rhetorical game it's like being like exactly like the left are the real races because they're always talking about race and it's like well let's bring it up all the time and which people are bringing

25:07up and talking about race that's important it's not just a word saying a word like right sure I guess if you want to call this being pro eugenics if you if you want to if you want to redefine those things yeah I guess we're all not eugenics nobody wants to be cousin fuckers yeah his argument is like well we we criminalize incest because of birth defects right because it leads to higher birth defects and that's eugenics and that's idiotic right for one thing like people hate the idea of a pregnant mother abusing drugs and alcohol because it can cause birth defects and other harm to an eventual child it's not eugenics to want to avoid a totally preventable case of fetal alcohol syndrome that's not eugenics that's just like not wanting a kid this suffer for no fucking reason right yeah um now in this case really it's it's not about eugenics right um but still the author of the article insists if you agree that people who are genetically related should not have children or should see a genetic counselor congratulations you're a eugenicist and that's nonsense for a very

26:10simple reason eugenics is not about trying to prevent specific kids from having birth defects eugenics less popular yeah fox worthy bit that he had right he might be eugenicist yeah uh um eugenics as Francis Galton would have been quick to point out is the attempt to direct the improvement of an entire race right you the fact that the goal is racial improvement is critical the German state is not trying to improve the German race by stopping these people from having kids that are going to be at a massively higher risk of birth defects my suspicion is it's really expensive to the German state health care system and they don't want to deal with that right I mean every society right it's freedom versus safety right where it's yeah exactly much freedom as they can well not like ruining safety and so uh countries have determined like listen you just can't fuck your sibling sorry yeah like we've done the math and it's it's more it's more trouble than it's worth as hot as your sibling is it's just not worth it and it's it's just not it has nothing to

27:17do with trying to improve the race right that's not the goal here yeah trying to stop children from suffering or save money for the health care system either way it has nothing to do with eugenics we'll talk a little bit more about the ea isn't it get back to Galton but first ads warning the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grownups ea g h hurry up and don't be late ea g h hurry up and don't be late lingo kids only suitable for kids if it gets stuck in mom said that's not our problem everything kids love download now for free wait this is a soda yeah and it has protein 10 grams no sugar zero and it actually tastes good it's skypop skypop protein soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein zero sugar

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29:23clubs have loner gear coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one find a beginner class for your kids near you at try fencing dot org that's try fencing dot org and we're back so i don't want to derail this episode too much by talking about effective altruism but you should know that this article that i'm picking on is just one example of what we might call eugenics in treason and effective altruist spaces and obviously i think regular listeners have heard we've i talked about e a lot in the sandbakement freed episodes this is like a silicon valley heavy ideology that basically went from arguing we should make sure charities are efficient before donating money to them to arguing that like well hypothetically the people who have not been born yet outnumber the people who have so that means that like it's actually justifiable to like destroy anyone who tries to slow down a i development because it'll obviously be better for the people have been born right that's a thing somebody a people will say right obviously it's a big group but like that's the folks i'm talking about and a lot of them are into fucking eugenics right

30:28e a people are often fascinated by transhumanism and the guy who first popularized the concept of transhumanism in the 1950s was all to us huxley's brother julian julian huxley was also president of the british eugenics society who owe their idea existence to france is galton and there are a eugenicist today among the most prominent effective altruists per an article in new humidest magazine by peter ward quote there is an obsession with iq an intelligence among the community that suggests some are at least flirting with eugenicist ideas in 2023 a former e a member reported that the center for effective altruism had tested a new met away of measuring the value of people using a metric called potential expected long term instrumental value or peltive people with iq's of less than 120 would have peltive points deducted while those working for e a organizations or on a i would rank higher you know you're the good guy when you're trying to figure out the value of a human mathematically yeah person number nice little guy for a person and it's the same thing to his galton of like and obviously people who are interested in the same things that i am are the

31:30most valuable right like clearly any way that's that e a cuz they think it keeps coming back more valuable which is that these objective like intellectual minds being like i have determined that everything we already believed was good what i do is right and it's good to be the way to be actually yeah this is actually only kind of human that you should be nip boston founder of the future of humanity institute at oxford is a prominent modern leader in the effective altruist community who was often considered the father of long termism which is that idea that future hypothetical unborn people ought to have more moral weight than the smaller number of real living people in crisis who exist right now right yeah we're starving today Elon must being like we must go to bars no matter how many slaves we throw at this idea where it's that idea in the long run this thing would be good actually yeah it's actually evil to feed people who are starving and like the Sudan right now because that money could go to getting us to Mars and that'll save humanity in the future so it's right to help poor people if that money could go to Mars um so yeah i've

32:35talked about nick boston the found like are some people call him the founder of uh of long termism he's a major EA figure philosopher amelp Torres a former uh EA guy himself recently published a 1996 email nick boston had sent where he insisted quote blacks are more stupid than whites per that article boston apologize but the statement caused a scandal oxford shut down his future of humanity institute in april this year which said it was based on a review of the best structures for conducting our academic research so frances galtan used different data to make basically the same argument that boston and a lot of e a's do which is that iq is what matters it's the best judge of someone's worth right or one it's one of the most important judges of someone's worth as a person right because iq definitely measures real intelligence and isn't just like a measure of certain kinds of intelligence and is also so basically it's the only thing that matters right um yeah and but it's not just that it's again the the most valuable people don't just have the highest iq's they're also working in a i or any a right the members of my community my subculture the guys i

33:36hang out with are more valuable people right like that's i it all comes down to the same thing that's a really important bit to grasp regardless of the science it's like how it's incredible how my cat out of all the cats happens to be the cutest like in the world i've done studies about this i looked into it and she's the cutest and the smartest cat yeah and if and she's sexy to other cats too she's the highest cat and that's what i figured out through extensive studies yeah it's just a wild coincidence that's my cat yeah so galtan substituted judges and scientists for e a's and a i coders because those didn't exist yet right but his beliefs were otherwise identical and while we focus so much uh and while we focused most so far on the racism of his ideology it's here i should note something about what galtan meant when he was talking about race right because race is a very different concept in the 1870s and 80s than it is even like 20 or 30

34:41years later at the start of the 20th century Susan Schumacher identified three different you kinds of race that galtan would refer to in his writings quote the first is in a literary sense when he makes statements such as poets are as sensuous erotic race exceedingly irregular in their way of life and judges are by no means an unfurtle race bantan another scholar of galtan also argues that he uses race in a taxonomic sense as a synonym for genus when he writes of the human race as a synonym for species when he writes that the american indian race is divided into many varieties or as a synonym for variety itself when he writes about the race of the Irish Celts or the English race however he believes that galtan's conception of race is better understood in line with his later thinking about heredity thus in 1892 when galtan wrote a new preface to hereditary genius he wrote in terms of the question of race or bantan believes he is using race as a synonym for heredity fantcher also maintains that galtan's understanding of race should be considered in line with his beliefs about heredity when galtan writes as a definition that races the constitutional

35:44peculiarities transmitted by inheritance and that's deeply confusing you see a number he's not at all he was realluse with the term race a poet can be a race sometimes to call ten right doing a race science that's yeah yeah and again they don't have a modern understanding of genetics and heredity right and and neither do his critics no one really does at this well one guy kind of does at this time but nobody else really does for a while yet and as a result all of his underlying assumptions and all of the underlying assumptions behind eugenic science are fundamentally flawed from the get go because it's based initially on an understanding of race that has nothing at all to do with genetics or inheritance right um Gregor Mendel who was also active through the mid to late 1800s is credited with discovering inherited and dominant recessive traits using p plants right he's how we learned about like dominant recessive genes galtan doesn't know about that when he's or talking about eugenics at first like his most of his writing on eugenics is pre any understanding of like dominant and recessive

36:49traits when he talks about like breeding and the like and part of why is that Mendel you know his founding I think it's around like the 1880s and so are such that he's like coming up with a lot of this stuff but his findings are initially ignored by the great scientists of the day including galtan and don't reemerge until around 1900 as a result when galtan plotted out how state should encourage exceptional people to breed he hasn't he doesn't know that recessive traits are a thing this is why for example while he would have insisted his disabled sister not procreate it would never have occurred to him to limit his father from doing so or himself even though it's very likely that either or both of them carry genes that might have passed this disability down to future children right he doesn't understand that at all he thinks like she's got something wrong with her but that could that couldn't have anything to do with my father because he made me do and I'm perfect right bad at racism like he's doing a bad job at his races he's better being a side he's bad at his knowledge of science is incomplete right oh yeah I mean yeah when we I mean we already covered it but I don't

37:52remember him going to like a lot of school I do not have much you know a lot of monkeys this is the era of the gentleman scientist though right like Gregor Mendel who does discover a lot of this stuff is like a monk who's just kind of fucking around with people right there in science right so there's there's not like a lot of there are colleges but there's a lot of science you should get to me self-taught right like galtan it would have been hard for him to have known but it is important that like he's he's completely wrong from the get go the fact that he would be like well someone like my father should be encouraged to breed and also like someone like my sister shouldn't be allowed to is a basic fundamental misunderstanding of like heredity right um galtan the atheist had by the 1870s and eighties appointed himself a scientific priest overseeing the collective brilliance if not the soul of the british people and he becomes in this period much more less concerned with stuff happened with like overseas stuff with like colonies and like these foreign people like he still cares about replacing or or halting the breeding of inferior races but he becomes mostly focused on

38:58what's happening in England because he becomes he can he decides that racial degeneration is an emergency that actually a white genocide might be he doesn't quite think of it as a white genocide because it's really not about white to him as much as it is about class but he thinks an idioticity is going to happen all of the stupid people are going to breed out the imminent men the intelligent people and the quality of the english race is going to decline because we've let fools breed too rapidly right and poor people primarily poor people right galtan's chief obsession from this period of his life on is urban decay there is in in early industrial London a teaming mass of homeless and indigent people folks in mad houses and poor houses on the streets of London and he decides that's going to have to change he cannot stand seeing homeless people because that is evidence that there's light that is evidence that the genetic quality of of his of his race is being degraded if this people are alive and have the potential to breed right he's horrified by

39:59that like a homeless person could make kids someone in a poor house can just be having kids that's the biggest threat in the world to him because he believes you can't you shouldn't ethically give those kids any resources you need to let them die so that's a tragedy obviously completely unavoidable and also that will mean less resources for like rich people who are smart right how does he imagine the race like I guess that idea of looking around going like looking at all these poor people and you know it's going to be all the smart people are going to disappear and it's like but you've got the human race has been doing pretty good so far so what do you think it's well in the past right does have an explanation for that right because he's looking at Darwin's origin of species right and Darwin had argued in that that like obviously natural selection favors those who are most most fit because they tend to out because they tend to outbreed the less fit golden comes in and says like well that's true but because of modern civilization and modern medicine we've kind of broken that cycle right and now people who are less fit are breeding more because like intelligent

41:04people often decide to wait or you know they had a big issue with like the church during like the medieval period putting a bunch of smart people making the monks in priests because then they couldn't breed and that was a disaster for the collective intelligence of Europe right that's a big thing one of gong's major issues with religion and his big it like he argues that now natural selection often favors people who are less fit and that these quote weekly ended in capable men will cause the degeneration of society if allowed to breed it's not quite white genocide it's more of a smart genocide yeah it's no it's funny however generation like you can go and find articles of people complaining about like kids are reading too many books these days that's going to walk their brains yeah where it's like there's always this idea of modern technology and it's very funny especially now that a lot of these guys who are like what is it good times create weak men those guys are the same guys being like also I invented this machine that can think for us and parent for us so galton is primarily the thing he comes to primarily blame for like breaking the natural

42:11cycle of things right from making natural selection not favor the strongest actually favor the weak social programs right that is the the unnatural thing that has caused that has like shattered the system that ensures that only the best procreate but because we have welfare programs that like help poor people survive and like feed starving kids that's going to ruin the species right that's his main argument it's very funny that these people never calculate you know you're talking about how like the bible has he's baked in morality where it's like you know be good to people I would argue that that's baked into our existence and the fact that it's clearly part of our survival that if we see another person starving we want to have that person like that is a it's natural part of how we progressed there's a white no and there's a lot of documentation of like altruism in the animal kingdom right it's not just human beings multiple species have it that there's no other real explanation

43:14for them like oh I guess they decided to do a nice thing for this other animal right and like yeah there's that's a broader topic of discussion that we can get into but there's a and I you know a part of the proof of it of like the and I would never want to reduce someone's like I don't think there's it's moral to be like oh someone's good because they have evolutionary value but like if you want to look at further evidence of like the evolutionary value of like within Galton's own sort of life story right you have an example of this person who is not like physically fit because of an inborn like illness that they had no control over but who is still massively contributes to her family and to her society that and Galton even recognizes that he's capable of exceeding in in like a specific instant oh well this is a person who contributed to society as much as anybody despite being disabled but he still concludes that on the whole disabled people are are right very worth very little and that's the thing is like everybody has evolutionary value except for Joe Reichen like it's like everybody is worth helping because everybody has something

44:19to offer the world we're a species yeah that's yeah exactly yeah speaking of things that work the sponsors of our podcast five six who is six five six who is six is Kali and Ali and Kali and Kali lingo kids only suitable for kids if it gets stuck in mom said that's not our problem everything kids love download now for free what if your soda actually did something for you introducing sky pop protein soda with 10 grams of complete protein zero sugar and 45 calories sky pop protein soda offers four delicious flavors with big taste and real benefits light refreshing and ready for wherever your day takes you it's anytime protein that helps you reach higher

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46:27near you at try fencing dot org that's try fencing dot org and we're back so we should talk a little about about the science of like genetic inheritance and the impact it has on intelligence right because obviously like heredity has a lot to do with intelligence right you know like that that's that's not a controversial thing to say um but also it's not the only or the primary thing and it's certainly an actor to say that like nurture can't do any which is what galton believes right because he doesn't get genetics and he's based all these conclusions at just like looking graphing all of the rich and prominent people that he thinks are imminent men and kind of estimating how many of them had successful kids right like that's all of his science and that's like a that's a really bad I that we know that that's nonsense now a 2018 study I found noted that quote across studies parents education correlates point three with children's intelligence implying that it accounts for 9% of the variance in children's intelligence right and that obviously that doesn't say anything about heredity we're talking about

47:30like parents education but that does suggest that the galtons obsessive focus on the education level achieved by someone's parents as a predictor of their kid's success is extremely short-sighted right because that does not like we know that that does not like guarantee or doom a kid if their parents are like having educated parents doesn't mean you'll be educated having done parent or having having uneducated parents doesn't mean you won't get an education there's some impact there but it's quite like 9% of the variance in children's intelligence right in theory there was a time everything we're being more educated got you a better job and not just student and that might help your kid down the line I feel like that's less of a case now yeah I mean and we probably it's probably recently that changes happened for there to be much to show from it right modern science science has also shown that the heredity of intelligence is vastly more complicated than galton believed for one thing the heritable elements of intelligence are per one researcher research paper I found extremely polygene which means there's no single like smart gene and as a part of why you

48:35often have cases people are like super geniuses whose parents are and whose family lives like you know normal people there wasn't much of a sign of that in the family before and then suddenly you get this mega genius and it's because I don't know both parents had like some interlocking sets of genes that that wound up you know influencing the intelligence of this kid in a way that's not predictable and certainly not something that we could have predicted based on the family history of the people who had that genius kid right at the one firm the one yeah that's just not how it works identical twins with similar educations will differ by as much as six IQ points in either direction and identical twins race separately attribute more than twice that veritability like a variability like a 15 point IQ difference up or down which shows again like a man there's a there that's a very significant degree in which like nurture or like your actual environment impacts things because these are people who are genetically identical and there's a 15 point gap in intelligence based on them being like raised in different areas with access to different

49:39education systems and different kinds of parents who have different tactics right that's a pretty massive gap yeah there's like documentaries about like identical twins being raised by different people and stuff like that and how vastly different your life is depending on yeah yeah intelligence is complicated it's not nearly as simple as Galton thought now I should note because I brought up twins Galton is the guy who starts doing that pretty much he is like the founder of twin studies as a major thing in science one thing that's happening in the background here a lot of these studies that I'm quoting in books that I'm citing Galton is kind of inventing a lot of the and helping to invent other people are doing it he's in dialogue with them but he is part of like how we come up with the way of how to do like a scientific study and how to like analyze statistics and like gather data from a population Galton does have a large role in inventing a lot of that he's inventing it to do bad science and racism but like he is influential in that process right and part by creating the idea of twin studies now he doesn't know what's going on genetically

50:41with the twins that he's studying like they they because they don't know like DNA back then right right like so there's a lot of but I would say all of those twin studies I have read that he has conducted had very questionable conclusions right I got him I have to imagine twins have had a hard time historic hard time lot of science is a fucked with a lot of twins well in the preface of the 1892 edition of his book on hereditary genius Galton described race mixing as one of the chief causes of social degeneration he was particularly concerned by this point that breeding peoples who were far from each other geographically would caught create weak and short-lived children by far he means that like well in african and a ure and a and a britain right are far from each other and so their genetics must not be compatible and and by necessity they'll create unhealthy children now trying to answer the question of like how is there our health are there health differences between like mixed race kids and kids who are not mixed race that's an incredibly complicated

51:41question um but one thing we can do there are some very basic ways to prove Galton wrong here right just in terms of like the basic level of like health and wellness that mixed race people have right for example people of european descent who carry genes for cystic fibrosis are less likely to pass them on when they have a child with somewhat of non-European descent because of the way like recessive traits work if you if someone who's like a carrier for cystic fibrosis and european has a kid with you know somebody who's like Chinese or whatever right that kid is less likely to get the genes for cystic fibrosis right people of Ashkenazi descent are likely to carry genes for tastes x disease but less likely to pass them on when they mix with other populations right so it these are and there's a number of genetic illnesses like this that are more common in people of like one ethnic group or another that when they like breed with people of other ethnic groups it's less likely that they pass on that genetic disease right um there's also a theory like if you wanted to build a stronger future generation it's just everybody bone everybody right like that's the secret

52:47I mean it's a good there's certain benefits to it right including like there's some benefits to the immune system I want to quote from an article I found on the doctor guy on line the immune system benefits greatly from genetic diversity one key component is the human leukocyte antigen HLA system a group of genes responsible for helping the body recognize foreign invaders like viruses in bacteria people with more varied HLA genes tend to have stronger immune responses because their bodies can detect a wider range of pathogens mixed individuals usually inherently a richer set of HLA alleles compared to those from genetically homogenous populations right and that doesn't mean mixed race people are healthier always or live longer lives like right there's so many other factors there right it just means Galton is wrong there's zero reason to believe that that mixed race kids are like sicklier or have shorter life spans right we just know that there's no evidence of that and there's quite a bit of evidence that in some cases it can reduce the odds of certain illnesses right um anyway it's just important to point out that he's wrong there by 1892 Galton had started focusing his eugenic obsessions on two groups with an English society who worried him the carriers

53:50of congenital defects and people of color who might or actively were interbreeding with the white European population this is like very uh white genocide adjacent again he's more in concerned with like smart people being genocide but obviously he doesn't think that non-white people can really be smart usually so right it does it is the same thing he's just not framing it quite the same right for obvious reasons latter the latter people non white people who are breeding with white people were of the greatest concern to Galton his out his conclusion by the 1890s is that nurture has almost nothing to do with outcome savages he wrote even when raised by European families were quote incapable of progress after the first few years of their lives while white people could learn and grow non white people lost that ability after a while and could only be educated for a limited period of time that's a really convenient thing to believe when you're like want these people to start working when they're like 14 or so or younger for you right last thing it's it's you're saying like it's not it's not being identified of racism it's just that

54:55racism is an ingredient in the largest equation like it's not racist not because it isn't racist but because just it's the the some of its parts in collude's racism in it it's already baked yeah a lot of his biographers will will argue that class was a bigger thing for Galton than race and his in his obsession with class also like was seen in his obsession with race and fueled his obsession with race but it all started because he's like a rich guy who thinks poor people are gross and scary right like that is the root of all of this right and I do think that that's broadly accurate not to minimize his racism I just think this does start with class right and like the people he's seeing in the Middle East and in Africa right they're mostly poor people right like the locals that he's talking about so terribly and he says very similar things about poor people he sees in London that and he often will well as we'll talk about he'll compare them to the poor to the the horeros that he saw in South Africa right now I don't think it's fruitful to like

55:56bust every single myth Galton has here because you know they're untrue but it is important that like important to note that like there was a lot of evidence that everything he's saying about like well you can't educate you know black people right past a certain point they can't learn more you know that that window closes quickly there's a ton of educated black men who are writing books and articles that are being read in and internationally by this point in time Frederick Douglas exists during his lifetime and is very famous right and Frederick Douglas is not the only black man who had been enslaved and became a prominent writer and political organizer James William Pennington also born a slave went to fucking Yale the first black man to go to Yale he was led to attend classes but forbidden from formally graduating although he was recognized in 2023 as having completed the coursework necessary to have gotten a degree Solomon Northrop published his account 12 years of slave in 1853 and in Galton's own England O'Lotta Aquiano published a harrowing account of his own youth as a slave and life as an explorer in 1791 a century before Galton wrote

56:59this shit right and I've read equiano's book and several works by Galton I'll tell you who struck me as a more intelligent impressive person and it's not the fucker who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth it's the guy who was stolen into slavery as a child became free wrote a best selling book became a major abolitionist organizer and was one of the first people to explore the Arctic right like I just find that more impressive than a rich guy want to talk to at the party yeah yeah Galton never read O'Lottas book doing so would have proved his very theory ally instead he began drawing conclusions from the physical characteristics he's observed in foreign peoples like the hot and tots the harrow and similar characteristics in the urban poor in London he concluded that Africans and British criminals had a lot of traits in common quote the greater part of the hot and tots about me had that peculiar set of features which is so characteristic of bad characters in England and so general among prisoners that it is usually I believe known by the name of the felon face I mean they have prominent cheekbones bullet shaped head cowering but restless eyes and

58:02heavy sensual lips and adding to this a shacking and added to this a shackling dress in manner and the felon face is a concept like cops kind of come up with this is like well you can tell who's a criminal and part because that way they don't have to tell is a criminal in fairs cops are up to definitely a thing that's a facial expression this out there yeah yeah there's there is cop face some people are typically cops yeah I'll show you felon face as like a yeah oh Sophie you're not you're not yeah oh they're trying he's gonna try to right he's gonna try to yeah because it just reminds me of like early on we were doing that episode when they the gene pattern like way doing evidence it's like on that level where it's like absolutely not yeah so I mean what part of what's going on here with felon face is that the 1870s to 1900 are a period of massive growth this is like a period of massive growth in the science of photography right

59:05camera technology leaps forward at a rate that is probably similar to how we feel about how cell phones have advanced during our lifetimes right you're going from like we've got this box that you have to like sit still by for like a long period of time and it kind of looks like shit to like people can just like travel with like cameras and take pictures of shit all over the world right that's it's a it's a massive change and galton it becomes obsessed with cameras right he loves photography and he starts working with Sir Edmund Dacane the inspector of prisons for England who provides him or for London who provided him with photographs of convicts from several institutions and before we go any further I need to expose a flaw in galtons research which is that he is basing because he's going to try to decide find the physical features that show someone's a criminal that you can predict crime by being like well if someone has this sort of face structure that means they're going to be a criminal and we should do something about them before they have a chance to hurt people right it's very funny because I think we've started we people have tried this recently with like a oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah they're we're going right back to it yeah this is this is absolutely something that AI is going to

1:00:09accelerate again yeah that person has high cheekbones felon face stuff like that stuff like that yeah we'll get into it so yes it is stuff like that but but before we get an I need to point out a massive flaw in his like underlying assumptions which is that police and judges in Victorian England are even worse at their jobs and their modern equivalents innocent people are convicted of crimes regularly in this period of time as they are today but even more regularly back then and they're also because he's also taking pictures of like people in mental institutions to try to determine well what sort of facial features features mean that's like show insanity so that we can know who's going to go crazy before they do right you can tell it right you can diagnose them just by looking at them he believes that should be possible right because he believes that there's the face reflects these mental characteristics that are inherent to people um and one of the problems with this is that people often wind up in mental mental institutions in this period of time for reasons that have nothing to do with mental health and a 2012 book on mental illness and late Victorian Britain Philip Cohen related this story the daughter of an architect so a socialist and a feminist

1:01:10announced her intention to live openly outside of wedlock with James Sullivan a member of the working class and secretary of a local London branch of the SD Alpha local socialist party cohabiting with Sullivan would express her commitment to socialism and her related rejection of the institution of marriage but such behavior crossed rigid lines of class and religion not to mention conventional morality therefore her father and two of her brothers exploited the English lunacy active 1890 to launch a preemptive strike by having her involuntarily committed to an asylum aptly called the priori on an emergency basis i.e not to exceed seven days based on the statement of a single physician this temporary commitment was the was the intended prelude to a long term involuntary institutionalization now the good news is this woman is freed eventually there's like a public outcry and she does get out but that shows you what and first and at 1890 law is something that galtan had lobbied for he was very much in favor of getting crazy people off the street and locking them up at least that he could study them but like that's a lot of people who wind up in a silence yeah any study to have someone put there you know yeah any study based on people who've been in

1:02:15prison or institutionalized in general if the study is to determine what type of person has that like even if you both down to like shoplifting like if you're like we took all the mug shots of shoplifters therefore we have determined what a shoplifter looks like the problem is the data always starts with humans it it's the same with AI right training AI it always starts with human errors so what you're actually getting is we looked at what cops most likely like see for a shop like what type of person cops approach first yeah or like that people's suspective shoplifting it doesn't give you here's what all the shoplifters look like it's just here's all the shoplifters that got caught for shoplifting for various reasons including the biases of the people around them it just doesn't work it like it especially the older the the data obviously from this time like it's a nightmare starting point yeah so galton ignored the possibility of the justice system

1:03:17in the mental health system might be flawed and instead considered these photos of criminals to be the best kind of evidence he grouped them by crime and expected their physical features would provide clues to the crimes that they'd committed for Schumacher quote in the first instance by site he established his own satisfaction that men who committed larceny possessed large foreheads and small skulls and burglars were inclined to be squinty faced however once he subjected the photographs to his comp composite process the results did not give him the outcome he had anticipated instead of identifying the criminal he determined that he had revved instead revealed the face of a man who was likely to fall into criminal behavior so he starts by being like I should be able to determine who is a criminal by like compositing all of the faces of criminals together and then like looking at which guy in this lineup both best matches that and that doesn't actually work at all so instead what he realizes that like well this guy who I identified as likely a criminal because his face looked like this composite of other burglars he hadn't committed a crime yet but he's gone right he he he he he he must be a future criminal yeah therefore the test

1:04:23is correct is good and I got to show you some of these so he's going to put up on the Netflix now some of these these composite portraits that he's doing and there's that if you can't see it this is like a bunch of different like a dozen or so pictures of guys that are all like composited from like bunches of people at the bottom you've got like portraits at the top of a min convicted of convicted crimes of violence and then they're they're several of the portraits are combined in the bottom to and it just kind of makes blurry looking people right like the all seven guy just has like up but it looks like a weird AI composite because he's just got like eight fingers and stuff like I'm not sure what you're supposed to get out of this but golden is obsessed with it like he is convinced this is the new pre crime if we just figure out crime face then we can stop crime before it happens you know um and it's it's just silly nonsense from the jump he has never able to none of his own research ever like backs any of this up as much as he thinks he's constantly

1:05:24frustrated to be like okay but like it's this is what their faces are supposed to be and yet when I try to actually like catch a criminal using these techniques it never works right what is the science here like just their larger foreheads make them more aerodynamic for the crimes like what's the evolutionary purpose of having a right face I'm sure some of this is descended from franology you know like that that's that certainly influences this right and some of it's just he has always been if you remember back to his explorations in Africa he's like measuring ladies he thinks they're hot on the slide with a sextant from a distance he's always been obsessed with measuring people and he this is what he really starts to professionalize measuring people in the late 1800s he calls it anthropometric techniques and these are ways he wants to categorize and help predict criminal behavior by taking on a lot of data about the physical characteristics of criminals and people with like mental illnesses and once he starts making these composites it has a horror it doesn't actually

1:06:26help find any criminals it never like works out scientifically but he becomes obsessed with seeing criminals in every crowd in London once he knows like this is the face of a robber this is the face of a rapist this is the face of a murderer anytime he's around a crowd he's like my god the sheer number of maniacs and criminals London is overwhelmed with a flood of crime and violence because like these people have faces that look kind of like his weird composites and should that means they're destined to crime I wish he had AI it's weird to say I wish this guy had a yeah it just he seems like the kind of person if you gave him Claude he it would it would actually help us out in the long run because he like invent his own type of math and then light himself on fire and then we yeah Claude might have taught him and fucking ending the problem before yeah Claude might have taken him out of the gene pool so to speak so galton starts getting increasingly paranoid and obsessive after this period of time in another one of his books inquiries into human faculty and

1:07:26its development in 1883 published in 1883 he wrote the proportion of weekly and misshapen individuals is not to be estimated by those we meet in the streets the worst cases are out of sight we should parade before our minds eye the inmates of the lunatic idiot and popperous the prisoners the patients and hospitals the sufferers at home the crippled and the congenitally blind our human civilized stock is far more weak through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animal whether wild or domestic that's not based on science he's not doing studies of like animals and how many of them have congenital birth defects or any of that he's not even attempting to he's just declaring this he's not even there's no statistic basis for all that he's the stats guy this is just like what feels right to him based on kind of looking looking at people right like that that's all this is so he's very smart he's really smart guy yeah um and that this also points out something the fact that he is including the poor houses people who are literally being locked up just because they're in debt to like an insane asylum does re-emphasize that point that like this is about class right eugenics is hugely about class

1:08:32galtons inferior people aren't just the mentally and the physically ill they're the poor and people convicted of crimes in other words they're people of a lower class than frances galtan as biographer michael bull were noted galtan also used this book to expand his advocacy for a eugenic society quote he suggested that a scheme of marks for family marriage should be devised that ancestral qualities as well as personal qualities could be taken into account individuals with a high composite score should that mean courage to marry early by the provision of endowments as well as bias and subpride the attitude of mine that I should expect to predominate amongst though among those who had undeniable claims to rank as members of an exceptionally gifted race would be akin to that of the modern possessors of ancestral property or hereditary rank a man of good race would shrink from spoiling it by a lower marriage and the fact that he's he's looking at high race is the same as her like inheriting high property right it's all it's all class you know yeah which is the dumbest thing to judge people based off i mean it's bad to be the reason for rich yeah but like

1:09:34like class seems like the most arbitrary uh it is that's why i think partly why he has to dress it up as a race thing is because class is arbitrary and it makes it clear that he's just like a snooty rich asshole right he's gonna he's gonna he's gonna laugh it with some racism to make it work the racism's a little bit of a beard to make it seem scientific yeah right um now he still doesn't in the 1880s he's still not advocating for the repression of less fit people quote believing that it would ensue indirectly as a matter of course in other words you don't have to sterilize because how would we at this point in time people you don't have to like kill them you just have to if we just change the incentives and stop supporting them with social programs and spend that money on supporting rich people who are already rich and giving them more money to have kids that's how we get rid of these people right right now as a result of his obsession with anthropogenic documentation galton decided to turn his scientific mind to devising systems that would allow the police to identify people who were inclined to criminal behavior or who had committed crimes speaking of

1:10:36criminal behavior even as an old man galton continued to exhibit what we would call today a criminal and deeply troubling inclination towards measuring and describing the hotness of girls he liked without telling them what he was doing this this continues throughout his life pull perpervers biography quote in 1880 he exhibited a pocket registrator for recording the number of individuals of different kinds in a crowd without attracting attention and he also drew attention to the ease with which registers may be kept by pricking holes in paper of different compartments with a fine needle he used the latter technique to construct a beauty map of the British Isles classifying the girls he passed in the street or elsewhere as attractive in different or repellent he found London to rank the highest for beauty in Aberdeen the lowest so he creates this like pocket notebook that he can without looking rate the hotness of people like to like and he uses this to create a map of where the girls are hottest in the British and he would have done great with AI and like I did I he would have loved these things this is like the John Doe notebook in seven is

1:11:40what you're just yeah yeah serial killer book you know when it made me think about is the very first version of Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg had was a way yes it was hot or not it was a way for people like rate the girls in their school right like he and all the now the same man yeah it really does feel like any era there's certain like characteristics of people like this dirtbacks I would call them dirtbacks dirtbacks come back to the characteristics yeah and one is like trying to boil people down to these equations to able to rate them and give them quality to make yourself feel better I assume that's the point right the other is doing a secret hot or not right because we can't be able to see you do it again like looking at pictures of him I you know I'm not him I don't want to rate people's looks but it's very clear that he's the kind of guy who perhaps if someone had a notebook with him in it he wouldn't be at the top of that no he wouldn't

1:12:41turn out so well yeah right so there's this idea of almost like reclaiming it or like this guy who probably knows that he's nothing to look at you know he I think it's more I think that that's what he sees is like the actual value of like women right is their hotness whereas like men clearly have other things going on he's got that sexy brain of his right right uses a fucking prison yeah mug shots to create the prison mug shots yeah I mean don't forget this is the guy called that that woman an uncommonly good looking female lunatic yes yes my favorite classification of person in 1886 Galton turned his keen scientific mind to the study of British Jews and you know this isn't going to go anywhere oh no he's working with him yeah yeah oh boy oh oh oh yeah yeah now he's his partner in this is an anthropologist and like his story in a Jewish community he's named Joseph Jacobs I don't actually don't know if Jacobs is Jewish but he's not like racist like

1:13:45he's actually like interested in just like studying Jewish people I guess for whatever reason but I don't think he's a bigot or at least not compared to Galton uh Galton though considers Jews to be inferior to Europeans because Jews have Asian origins and he sees his evidence of the fact that like as they're doing this like survey of the like Jews and London a lot of London Jews live in large like it live in like the inner city and like crowded neighborhoods and have large impoverished families right and right I'm guessing a lot of the respect by the era a lot of these folks would have come from like Eastern Europe is like refugees because like shit's really bad and like Russia and the like you know um so you've got all so he he takes them out to like oh this is proof that like they're an inferior kind of people they have these large families they live in these you know these bad neighborhoods right um Galton conducted a study of these people and reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute quote the feature that struck me the most as I drove to the school for the adjacent Jewish quarter was the cold scanning gaze of man woman and child and this was no less conspicuous among

1:14:48the school boys I felt rightly or wrongly that every one of them was cool the appraising me at market value without the slightest interest of any other kind I felt that as I was hiding in these bushes yeah Jews were acting very suspicious about maybe it was nonsense but I think they boiled me down to just thinking of my financial value I have no evidence for this no one said anything but all of them did this yeah like me yeah in his this is a lot of stuff right is like yeah I'm going to screw up this fact but like the idea of like Jews controlling the wealth came from the fact that Jews were allowed banking jobs at one point and not other job yeah yeah that's that's like the like the basics of that are accurate right that like Christians and Muslims were forbidden from like collecting interest and stuff and so that's part of one like one reason why Jewish people came to dominate the banking industry for a period yeah and there's a lot of that right I remember yeah there's like the whole thing was scourge McDuck this is such it's like such racism that it's I didn't even know I didn't even know that like Scottish people are cheap and it came from love yeah

1:15:54the famine of them like having to save money and everybody be like yeah they didn't have any money the stereotype of like the lazy and this is another thing that like fucking throws a wrench in galtan's bullshit there was an understanding at this period of time that like American southerners like the poor southerners were like a worse quality of white because they were like lazy and slow and right stupid it turns out what happened is like a large chunk of the south people had horrible hookworms that like fucked up every aspect of their life including like their their brains because they have fucking worms like white people love kicking someone in the shit and then going like how you Irishman always holding your shins always hold your shins yeah yeah um but this is one of the things that's interesting that's interesting here is that he is conducting this study with a guy who's not racist and comes to wildly different conclusions in part because that other guys actually trying to like do a like study and like the survey the population and like kind of what physical

1:16:57traits to people haven't come with illnesses or more common whereas galtans looking hiding in the bushes and being like they're clearly appraising me with their juis you know like literally that's the difference between the one guy's doing science and galtans just like well I'm pretty sure they all were thinking about this so that's what I've concluded in my report to the royals society I'm imagine now like all of his studies being like frank from its always sunny like I'm just picturing frank from that of that it's a lot yeah he does take a lot of notes and document stuff because there's all sorts of numbers but when you get down to his basic conclusions it's often he decided all Jewish people felt this way because he looked at a crowd once and her dissertation Susan Schumacher Susan Schumacher summarizes the differing reactions to his work here quote he and many of his scientific colleagues believed that he had successfully captured the Jewish type Jacobs and another Jewish scholar Dr. Adolf Neubauer however had quite different opinions from Galtan as reported in their presentations to the anthropological society

1:17:59they both argued that the Jews of Europe were so racially mixed that they could not be distinguished from other Europeans and that if there was something in their expressions it was environmental and related to them being oppressed individuals rather than from heredity would Galtan rely a regarded as biologically determined a visual embodiment of an inferior race Jacob saw as a social phenomenon and again Jacob's is obviously correct here now despite the fact that his use of composite photography had consistently failed when he tried to validate it as a predictive of anything and that the constant disagreements of his colleagues kind of proved his objective findings were heavily subjective Galtan only grew more obsessed with using composite photography and making like objective judgments about large groups of people based on no real evidence he toured a silence across the country trying to average patients with tuberculosis to prove some sort of link in their facial features because there was a belief that like tuberculosis isn't cause of it it wasn't like a disease like we know it is it was like a thing that some people with

1:19:00like bad genes have because like they inherited tuberculosis right and so there's like this narrow ovoid face and doctors this isn't just Galtan doctors believe low the narrow ovoid face is a sign of tuberculosis right that somebody might be you know at risk of coming down with it later in life if they have this face style and Galtan like averages a bunch of tuberculosis patients using this like facial composite and he doesn't find that right it does that narrow ovoid face just like isn't a thing there's actually like no facial features that seem to predict tuberculosis and rather than seeing this as proof that because he could have been like oh I guess everyone else is wrong and I being smart Galtan got to prove them wrong using science he does not um he reports that like he didn't find a link but he he concludes by being like future tests will definitely confirm a right I just didn't get it right this time but I'm sure this is still accurate because again he's really not that good a scientist he really wants faces to matter he also started assembling composites of desirable features in the belief that this would inspire ordinary citizens to see

1:20:05what could be achieved through eugenics he never like labels these are explains them to just like put out as propaganda of like look at how good looking people could be in the future if we stop some of you from breeding his work here never supported his actual beliefs about eugenics but Galtan would remain obsessed with facial composites for decades however his next area of scientific endeavor would be partly inspired by the failure of his composites to help identify criminals we'll talk about how Francis Galtan helped invent modern criminal science and fingerprinting in part four but Dave we're done for today my question before we wrap is uh do we have a list of those desirable features and does he have any of them really smart and rich so that's most of it okay Dave you got any pluggables oh why not um I am uh co-host of a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed we talk about movies movies it's it's moving pictures we talk about that

1:21:07that you know that I heard about that yeah we also have a patron patron.com slash gameplay unemployed we have exclusive podcasts on there such as one that's called uh there's Tom and Jeff watch Batman there's fox molders and maniac there's a bunch and we watch movies with our patrons as well we do a lot of movies stuff we like movies we regularly I'll have people especially after a rough episode be like anyone got a podcast that's less depressing to to help me kind of clear and I always recommend Gamefully Unemployed oh thank you check out check out Tom and Dave and check out the next and last part of our history our series on Francis Galtan slightly later this week or immediately if you're listening to this in the future when all the episodes are out which statistically most of you will be so congratulations you know many great things that we don't and in fact are a superior kind of person because you live in the future yeah we're probably dead bye yeah baby behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone media from more from Cool Zone media visit

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