Part Two: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

0:00And we're back! Welcome back to Behind the Basters podcast about very worst people in all of history. And this week we're starting our series on Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. And boy, what a wonderful day for an actual eugenicist, Mille Yinnopolis, to have just gotten taken into custody by eyes for a long time. Oh my gosh. His immigration visa. And look, listen folks, if someone, if you're one of the people who's been like we shouldn't laugh in Mille Yinnopolis being taken into custody by eyes. I want to read you a post Mille O'Mail a couple of years ago. What is the etiquette if you're going about your business and find yourself observing an ice raid? I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand in the street or should you find some kind of awning or motor vehicle? No, it's really funny and good that he got taken into custody by the exact people who we enabled and cheered on his entire life. And then we stuck in immigration jail looking like shit, you can see his fucking mug shot right now. We'll make sure we put that on

1:02the YouTube. Otherwise, just look it up. Fuck him. Yeah. It just because you Genesis. You can laugh at leopards eating someone's face. That doesn't mean you like leopards eating everybody's faces. Right? It's just I tried. We tried to stop the leopards from eating anybody's face. Mille, you were on team leopard and now they're eating your face. I just feel nothing for you. Nothing but joy. Because again, you're also a eugenicist like Francis Galton, the subject of our episodes, but not like David Bell, the guest of our episodes. David, you're not a eugenicist, right? No, I'm very moist right now though. You are moist. That's good. That's good. Because in the last episode, my cat was on the desk and I got him off and he spilled my red bull everywhere. I didn't realize until later. So I smell. Yeah, I smell awesome. I smell like radical. Yeah. Yeah. See, again, this is why Francis Galton was a eugenicist. If we had just applied more eugenics,

2:03you could have had a cat that doesn't knock things over. Probably. It has to exist. I actually don't think that does with the cats. I think they have to not have legs. I don't think you could breathe in the cats. Yeah. I don't think there's any amount of the cat genome. I think every individual like divisible chunk of the cat genome includes the nox shit off of a counter because it's fun gene. Like I just think that's integral to being a cat. I get it. Like if you don't know what gravity is, you can still see it and you're like, that's awesome. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like throwing things down. Yeah, exactly. This isn't I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. The King is the Lord. From focus features and be a claim director of Jason Bore. Oh, the King says work harder. You work harder. Starring Andrew Garfield. In a land of kings, one man will defy an empire. There will be no peace until we are free and ignite a revolution.

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4:07strategy and fun. It's like chess meets cardio, quick feet, quick decisions and a satisfying beep when you score a point. Kids, teens and adults can start anytime. No experience needed and many clubs have loner gear. Coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one. Find a beginner class for your kids near you at tryfencing.org. That's tryfencing.org. And speaking of beings without a conscience who are just doing shit to watch what happens, Francis Galton is touring the Middle East and North Africa, committing every kind of cinimationable. He next visited Syria where Ali slash Bob, the little coffee boy that they were traveling with, takes ill and oh yeah, no. He dies of what Francis describes as violent dysentery. When you gave the kid a name, I was like this can't end. They got a chance. He's got to die a horrible death. Now Galton pays for the tombstone,

5:08but writes that he doesn't attend the funeral because his presence as a Christian quote would have been seriously resented by the Muslims. And I know that it's common today. And first of all, I just need to say that's that's not true, right? It's not true that there's some sort of like wider prejudice among Muslims as a group against Christians or members of other faith, attending funerals or other like birthday or something like that of the like, right? Wedding similarly, it's been very common for a very long time in a lot of areas at least, for those to be interfaith events if it's a mixed community that the people live in, right? Sure. That's it. Yeah. I do think Ali's family probably didn't want him. That's what happened, right? Is he saying is like Muslims just don't want Christians or I think it's that they don't want you. And I can see him being like, oh, you're Muslim. You know what? Christian's there. I'm them going like, yeah, let's go with that. Yeah, let's go. Let's say that. Yeah, let's say whatever keeps you away. And these are not his, all these family. These are just some random Muslims who know that a Muslim

6:12has died away from his home and that these white people are going to do anything to even a proper burial, right? That's what's happening here. Ma, I will say in terms of looking into this, I did look into like, was it permissible in the past for members of others? And like as far as I can tell, yes, it certainly is today. Crescent funerals, a Muslim funeral provider in Lester, England says it's fine on their website. I found a bunch of like Muslim religious scholars saying stuff like, yeah, if like your mom isn't Muslim and she dies or like a friend, you can go to their funerals. It's like, cool. Like God isn't angry about that. E Judges people. It's not for us to do. That's the general attitude. Most religions has those things, right? Right. Who gives a shit, man? Who gives a shit, man? You got to live your life. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what's going on. I think they didn't want him there because they knew he was a dick. And I think that that's, I'm not being presumptive by saying, I don't think he was allowed at the funeral because he was too much of an asshole. In order to kind of make the case that he was

7:13probably being a gigantic asshole, I want to read you something. He wrote an 1885 about his travels during this time. This is him as an older man looking back on his travels through the Middle East. And this is what came to his mind. Such a difference between the burbers and the Egyptians, you cannot strike a burber, but may flag as many Egyptians and beat them with sticks as much as you like. They are thoroughly slavish. So when I say I think he wasn't allowed at the funeral because he was, this is what he remembers about the time is the people you can and can't beat with a stick. That's what he remembers from his vacation. Now the burbers don't let you beat him. The Egyptians do. He would be at the funeral like using the boy as the chair for the, he needs to fucking hit it. People with this, yeah, slap in the, the boys corpse just having a grand old time. Like that's what he took out of the whole country of Egypt is you can really flag the shit out of these people. They don't do anything. Huh? I think there's got to be a lot of

8:13like customs being used this way. It's like the drinking age in Canada. Right. They're not going to bring it up unless you're an asshole. Right. You can see a lot of that, right? A lot. Yeah. Actually, it's our custom that you get the hell away from us. Yeah. Well, our custom is you leave immediately. That's our weird Muslim thing is get the fuck out of my house. Yeah. Yeah. So, Galton claimed to have sent Ali's property and do wages, the money that he'd earned so far, to his wife and Cairo after he died, along with a little present for herself and thought his duty fulfilled. This is clearly all I need to do. Alas, he writes, he'd quote, roused a hornet's nest of greedy claimants demanding payment to various relatives, his banker advised him to get out of the reach of the law as soon as I conveniently could. And that's why he insists trip in 1845 is because he stiffs this dead kids family and they're trying to pursue him for justice. Right. He's he frames that like he's being attacked, but he's like, and then in order to remedy this,

9:14I had to get away from the law. I had to bleed the country. Okay. Well, it sounds like a crime spree. It's like you committed a lot of crimes, Francis. Yeah. It's like, maybe you killed this kid. I don't know. Yeah. I wouldn't put it past him. If I was, man, if he was like, I'm sending you a little gift. I'd be like, no, I don't even want to know what you consider a gift. Your husband's died. Here's a little present for yourself. I got you some perfume. Like what? Yeah. I would not put that perfume on me. Yeah. I don't know what it would be. Yeah. I don't know if it's what killed my husband. Now, he sales home with two living tokens of his travels. He takes open some home, some like living souvenirs, a pair of monkeys. And he's allowed to take them into England. They're supposed to go into quarantine, but he's a rich white man. So nobody makes him obey the law. However, upon his return to England, quote, on a chilly November day, I failed to fight a comfortable night's lodging for my pets, but an old friend who was living at a apartment kindly undertook their charge. He handed them with many instructions to his landlady who thought and perhaps said,

10:17dread the beasts and shut them up in the cold scullery where they were found the next morning dead and one in other's arms. Jesus. Honestly, that was, yeah, that's the leak. That's like, yeah, they died titanic style. Yeah. I'm plugging each other for a warrant. Yeah. My god. Because you wouldn't put them in your room and you're blaming on his landlady. Like they're your monkeys. That I expected that to go worse, to be honest. Yeah. I knew the monkeys were going to die no matter what happened. I thought maybe a few children were going to go to. There's a sense of euphoria. I think you do get when freezing to death that I've read about. So that of the ways a pair of monkeys could die in London in the mid 1800s. Yeah. Probably one of the more merciful things that's quick. He's just, so it's funny because like, I guess this is true for many of your episodes, but it feels very true here where it's like, when you bring a bad person on, a lot of the bad shit they do is often around like a specific theme of things they believed in. This guy's just an asshole.

11:23And that's the, like, he's just a dumb asshole. If you read the summaries of Galton's life, it'll always be he invented and it'll list all these different mathematical innovations in science because he invented a lot of important stuff. And then also eugenics like he was a really, he was a racist, but a scientific racist. And the way again, the summaries make it feel is that like, well, he was an educated man of a different time who came to believe something bad. But there's people like that who are not, I mean, you can say they're a bad person because they do believe a terrible thing. But they're not killing monkeys. They're not like personally vile every moment of his life. As far as I can tell, Francis Galton was an obscene human being every moment of his adult life, like just a thorough sinner, like a vile man to his core. Right. It's like that. Especially kind of asshole where like, yeah, everything he does is like adjacent to something awesome that somebody could do. Like I'm all for bringing some monkeys. Sure. Take some monkeys dangling that does sound like a good guy. That's the good 90s. Yeah. So be it. Sure. But like,

12:29yeah, then the fate of the monkeys is it's so scummy. So they didn't fucking may see each of the monkeys and died. Yeah. Yeah. I was worried he would be like, I would have to do a lot of like arguing with him and proving the science wrong in order to make it clear what a bad man. He was a no, just his life makes that clear. He was a fucking monster. He was an abominable person. And I should note here because Galton was a statistics nerd, he might have found it interesting because I counted. He's been 70 words discussing the deaths of two monkeys and 17 discussing the death of Ali, a human being. Not surprising. Not surprising at all. Yeah. Francis named the child. He named the child a different name. Yeah. Yeah. So Francis spins the neck. Well, I don't know if it was a child because he had a wife. I don't know what age. He says coffee boy, but they call a lot of adults who aren't white boy. I think that's what's the appointment, right? I don't know if that's worse. I guess he was young, but he had a wife. He could have been 45. Who's given the way these

13:36people talk? Yeah. Francis spent the next few years living the life of an English gentleman shooting and fishing from Wales to Scotland and learning the ABCs of life in the English countryside. He writes that like, I didn't know how to be an English gentleman because I never had to be before my dad died. So he has to figure that out now. And when he describes what he had to learn, it's how to shoot things. That's all there is aside from dressing right and being polite in public. It's just shooting. That's all being an English gentleman is shooting different things. Bollware rights of this time. He was invited to shoot on a friend's grousemore in Scotland and spent a summer in the Shetland seal shooting and bird nesting. Amazing. I should note here, I don't know it does look like the Scottish seals are endangered right now, although I don't know if they were in his time. So that may not be on him, but the black grouse nearly went extinct in Scotland during this period of time because of guys like because of Galton and guys like him. Anyway, after several restless years of shooting animals and reading books, Galton decided to undertake a proper expedition to

14:37Africa in 1850. And by this point, he's evolved enough as a person. He's pushing 30 at this point. He know like her wants to be a tourist, right? He wants to be an explorer. Schumacher notes this in her dissertation. And this is what he wrote about his motivations in 1849. Blank spaces in the map of the world were both large and numerous and the position of many towns, rivers and notable districts were untrustworthy. The whole interior of South Africa and much of that of North Africa was quite unknown to civilized men, right? So there's just not maps of this area that people do have been living in for forever. And that's what he wants to go over there is to make like maps of these these blank spaces. I'm not anti. Obviously like it's good that scientific maps that are like universal around the world exist now. That's a positive change. It didn't need to be him. It's like you ever have like that scumbag friend who's just like, I'm going to become a Malsanta

15:42and you're like, no, please. Really? Are you allowed to be your own kids again? I thought that was like a five year. Okay. So I talked recently about Percy Fawcett who's an explorer from like a generation or two after Galton's heyday and that he was doing the same thing. He was another monster who went to go make maps of places that didn't have maps. Francis was right at but not quite at the start of the quest to map the world. And like most things in life in his life, he secured his initial in to the Royal Geographic Society via Nepotism because his cousin was a prominent member. He gets everything in his life through Nepotism. Very important part of the Francis Galton story. He does not ever in his entire life or in a single thing just on his personal merit. He doesn't try once. Never once. He doesn't try, but he tries with significant effort. It's like trying to be nine foot tall when you have a ladder, right? Yeah. The society helps him plan his first expedition to map chunks of West South Africa. Over the next two years, he had repeated contact with three

16:45different groups of native people. The Nama were heavily employed as servants by the Dutch and thus were quite westernized. The Herrero and Avambo weren't. In her dissertation for the University of Canterbury, Susan Schumacher disommerizes his impressions of these different peoples. Galton was unimpressed with the Nama and felt superior to them as he outsmarted the current chief, Junker Afro-Conner, and managed to secure both passage for himself and convince the chief to sign up to a western style legal code which prescribed Junker's behavior particularly against the Herrero whom they were murdering and stealing cattle from at the time. Galton also disliked the Herrero while he considered them to be aesthetically pleasing, magnificent models for sculptors. He was critical of their moral and intellectual attributes. Describing the Herrero, or Demares, as he called them, he writes, there is hardly a particle of romance or affection or poetry in their character or creed, but they are a greedy, heartless and silly set of savages. The Domra's have a vast number of small superstitions, but they are all stupid and often very gross, and there's not much that is charismatic to, there's characteristic in them. So again, he hasn't speak their language. He doesn't really know anything

17:50about their art or culture. He's meeting these people as part of a surveying mission and trying to like get them to sign treaties to help like the local colonials. This is the same as if someone had met Galton and his friends when they were murdering and hooring their way through North Africa and been like, ah, so this says everything, the Europeans don't make art. All they do is just molest people and like, well, kill monkeys occasionally. Yeah, there's more to the culture than just Francis Galton, right? Yeah, he's lost all privileges here to judge anything. Yeah, exactly, given his fucking behavior. The only local people's Galton liked were the Elvambo, which again are the people who are like commonly used as slaves and servants by white people in the area. And so they're very westernized. He referred to them and praising them as being very domestic and he applauded the lack of popperism in the country. That means everyone's working for white people. So there's not anyone unemployed because any black person who doesn't work for a

18:50white person is unemployed, right? That's his attitude. And even though he likes the Elvambo, he still talks at length about how ugly he finds them and he's slander. He's specifically, he talks a lot negatively about their women in particular. He really likes to comment negatively on how gross he thinks specific women are. He puts this in his like scientific papers home about like his his investigations of this culture. Galton returns home to Europe after this journey more racist than ever and a hero for his groundbreaking exploration of South Africa. He receives a society gold medal and the year after he got back, he wrote a book about his experiences that became a bestseller all across England. Critics at the time did note that he really seemed to have some very strong and very specific opinions about the native people. His scientific recollections are replete with descriptions of in the case of the Elvambo, Ugly Bonimin. But he again saved specific graphic distaste for the Elvambo women who he described as, decidedly nice looking,

19:51their faces were open and merry, but they had rather coarse features and shown all over with butter and red pigment. They have like cosmetics that they apply to themselves that he gets like stains his nice linen clothing when he's trying to molest them and that really upsets him. Galton also exhibited a fascination with measuring and quantifying the bodies of native peoples. He likes to measure them to like determine how long their arms are and their he's this is pre-uginics. He's doing this before that. He's just fascinated in measuring people. He would later justify this by his work in eugenics and his standing as a prominent race scientist. But his writing at the time before he comes up with those things proves that his initial interest in measuring people is not scientific. It's sexual. In his biography of Galton, Bulwer writes about the time Francis used his quote, sextant for an unusual purpose. And a sextant is like a tool that you use generally when you're on a boat and stuff, but it's for like determining like where you are.

20:53Right? It's a navigational tool, but you can use it to determine like distance and stuff, so you could use it to like figure out measurements. I don't I'm not I don't understand the math, right? But what happens is that while he's visiting the Herrero, Galton meets the wife of his interpreter. And this lady is really hot. He describes her as a Venus among the hotend tots, right? The hotend tots are the Herrero and a Venus is a European like Venus is the European God of like beauty and or not European, but the Greek God of beauty and love. And for by this point in time, because they're not pagans, but the the term a Venus is a term anyone in Europe would recognize as a hot lady, right? That's what he's saying is she was hot, right? So there's this hot lady who's the wife of his interpreter. And he he's as soon as he looks at this woman, he describes himself as being perfectly aghast at her development. He's talking about like her measurements, right? She's got a large breasts, right? That that's what he's talking about, right? So he inquires of his white friends and he told they told him that she was quote, the lady who

21:54ranked second among her people for the beautiful outline that her back affords. In other words, her really, she's got the second best ass in the tribe is what the white people say of this woman, which gives you an idea of how common it is to sexualize these people among the whites. Is it? Yeah, here's I guess. Yeah, question. Yeah, this does feel like fortune in cell speak, you know what I mean? Yeah, that's all the year. Baby. Yeah, and I know it's like probably how they talked back then. This is the equivalent of him saying like she's got some sweet milkers or whatever, but like it's it's feels grosser. It feels grosser. Yeah, it's what he's doing to is like there's certain industries right where like like the you know, you ever hear you always hear those stories about like a fertility doctor in pregnanting a bunch of women, right? Those occupations where I feel like when someone was like I want to be a fertility doctor, the first question you have to ask them is why why? Yeah, I don't like I mean we our episodes on fertility

22:56doctors are literally all fertility doctors are bastards because it keeps happening not to all of them, but a lot. Right. It's one of those industries where it's like listen, there are people who are like I believe in this and I want to help families, but you're going to get some freaks. I feel like the medical industry has done a better job over the years of weeding out, you know, serial killers and in regular work on it. Yeah, but this is the era where there's a lot of no one's trying where it's like no one's screening. So if someone's like I want to be a serial killer, oh, you know what I could just do? I could just go to medical school. Just be a doctor. I can cut away. I want as much as I want. Right. Using this like the the baby is kind of scientist. Yeah, front of science where it's like it's not doesn't mean they can't contribute, but it does mean that it's like sadist getting an opportunity to be sadist. Yes. And or in his case, perverts getting an opportunity to be a pervert because that's what this is about for him. So yeah, he's a pervert. These white people about this hot lady and they're like, oh, the only person with

24:00a better ass is the chief's wife, her mother. And then they say the latter, the chief's wife, however, was slightly passé. Well, as the former was in full ambon poire, right? Which I think I'm pronouncing that sort of right. It's like a French term for in good shape, right? So they're saying well, her mom has a better ass, but she's getting kind of old. And so this lady's really like, she's really at the prime age, right? Now, I'm going to continue with Galton's writing about what he does because he sees this hot woman, right? I profess to be a scientific man and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape. But there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of hot and taught and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my foot rule could be of his measure, what why he's trying to measure her. And I really dare not ask my right. And I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me because it's like his wife, basically. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form.

25:01The object of my admiration stood under a tree and was turning herself about to all points of the compass as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. She couldn't like see me and she was just like walking around, but she was like turning around so I could see her ass. I could tell that. She knew. She knew. She looked at it. She liked it. Of a sudden, my eye fell upon my sextant, the bright thoughts struck me. And I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally and so forth. And I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake this being done. I brought, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood. And having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms. So in order, because he wants to measure this lady's ass and tits and stuff, but he can't like ask her, he uses a sextant and like his knowledge of geometry to get her measurements without her knowing. Get really self-energy. I will also real metaglasses energy. This guy would have been the first in line

26:01to fucking by metaglasses if they'd been around in his time. Oh, yeah. Oh, these days you just take a picture on the subway, I guess. Yeah, this is advanced. Yeah, this is a very advanced pervert. He is. Yeah, he's got to give him that. Yeah, he's a pioneer of perfect. It took a lot more effort to be that kind of pervert in the Victoria. Yeah. Yeah. It is amazing. It's a, it is. And also, I had not realized, I had always assumed, because I've known for a long time, we've talked about the show about scientific racism and that all comes out of Galt and science. He's the father of all of that and to realize that the origin of all of that, of all of you, Jinx of all this skull measuring is him trying because he thinks this black lady is hot, but he can't say anything about it. So he's like secretly trying to get her measurements. That's, it's always been brilliant. It's always been pornographic for these people up to today. The racist today are no different. You know, oh, yeah. Yeah. I get I will argue most people are perverts in some way in his world. You don't have

27:02to be unethical about it. Right. The judgment, the test of your perversion is how you deal with the fact that you're a pervert. Exactly. You got to contend with being a pervert. Yeah. The right, the ethical thing to do is find someone who either shares your perversions or is okay indulging yours consensually, right? Right. He's not, he doesn't care, not of them care about that, especially the 1800s. Right. Pervert plus consent is generally going to be all right. It is important. You understand, though, that all of what comes later, all of you, genetics is based in a prudent and often sexual obsessive interest in the bodies of non-white people. Right. Yeah. That they have to justify because you're not supposed to. Right. Because it's like to race mix. So you have to find an excuse. You know, um, and again, he's having sex with a lot of non-white people. Right. Usually I can't tell. I mean, I assume sometimes there were people who had chosen to like work in a, I that said, it's the 1800s. I don't know how relevant things like consent are when we're talking about a brothel in 1840. Um, anyway, to say

28:07Galton's writing was popular would be a massive understatement. He is, in fact, one of the writers who invents the grammar of Victorian era exploration and conquest, you know, like when we, whenever you read, basically any writing, justifying colonialism, it owes something to Galton. He creates the language with which we talk about colonialism. His first book was such a hit that he got to write a second in 1855 and the art of travel became a bestseller and in modified form, a textbook for the royal geographic society. This is the book that teaches you how to run an expedition and how to meet native peoples and interact with them. Oh, good. I'm glad he wrote a book about this. I'm glad the guy who never learned any of the local languages really and was never interested in any of the cultures he came to wrote the book on how to like be an archaeologist slash, you know, anthropologist in this period of time. That's good. Yeah, that's helpful. Here's ads anyway. What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Skypop Protein Soda.

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30:15More makes interesting and adventurous easy because your first month's free at domorestuff.com slash free. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you could wake up in the morning and just be better at one thing, what would it be? Would it be being more patient with your loved ones or being more diligent about your workout routine or just doom scrolling less? Whatever you want to get better at, therapy can be a helpful tool to help you get there. And if you're considering therapy, you might want to consider BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to find the right therapist. A short questioner helps match you with a therapist based on your needs and preferences. And if it's not the right fit, you can switch therapists at any time. Feeling better looks different for everyone. Whether you're looking to manage stress, build better habits, or simply check in with yourself. Therapy can help you move forward. So if you're considering therapy, maybe consider BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash behind. That's BetterHELP.com slash behind. Again,

31:19BetterHelp.com slash behind. And we're back. And by the way, we do not stand with that statement. I mean, quite frankly, I think that people from Michigan are the same as the rest of us. You know, whatever our advertisers said about them, that's not our stance on Michiganders. So we apologize, but obviously, you know, all jazz to my parents. Yeah. Look, a buckies needs to apologize to your parents because those ads, which may have been deleted. Maybe you guys didn't hear the Bucky's ads that are really racist against Michiganders, but they've been airing them on our podcast. So they're funny. Yeah. Bucky's ask where they hate people for Michigan. You know, email Bucky's and talk to them about why they hate everyone in Michigan. I don't know why that's not my choice. You know, that's Bucky's. Anyway, fucking circle K. I'll take over goddamn Bucky's Bucky's. So he's a leading man. He's a leading man in this field now and in Victoria and England. So he's also just like one of the most prominent men of his day because he's rich and he is now famous, right? So he is a celebrity after this point and very influential. Galton, the skits

32:24to join in on the great debates of the day and the great intellectual debates of his day are increasingly centered on race as Schumacher notes in her paper. There are a number of different theories as to where human beings came from in this era. And most people are either monogynists and thus believe that all humans share a single common ancestral pair because the Bible said so. There's people who believe basically that now, but for not Bible reasons for reasons of maybe genetically, that's what happened, right? We're not. We don't 100% know, right? And the upside of this belief though, if you do believe that all human beings descend from the same ancestral pair, it makes it can make other people take it different directions, but it can make a powerful argument for the quality of all peoples. The Christians who are abolitionists in the early and mid 1800s in part of abolitionists because they believe that like we're all like God made us all, right? Like, you know, we're all this different Adam and Eve. We probably should know each other, right? Again, monogynists were still off in very racist. They came up with different explanations for

33:26why some people are less equal than the rest. But also there were always among the monogynists some white-eyed maniacs who would like read the Bible and go, well, how does this not mean we're all equal? And if you take that too far, pretty soon you got John Brown on your hands, right? Which is good, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Polyghenism was the other big theory. And this anticipated that the different races of the world were different species with divergent and separate histories. And people found biblical justifications for this too, but it was much more popular among men who had discarded their faith. And Galton is in the process of discarding his faith in this period. He doesn't, he's not religious. He's not really an atheist yet, but he's not religious. That said, he hasn't discarded his prejudice. And so if you're the kind of person who doesn't really believe that much in Christianity, but you're still a bigot, you can see this as a justification for like why people who don't look like you aren't human. Now, right. In the modern era, I think the, by far the most supported stance is that like all human being share common ancestors.

34:31There is debate as to when did we fully become like what we would call modern day humans? And is it possible that like people left Africa and evolved into Homo sapiens separately from other groups? There is some debate about that. I don't. Sure. And I'm not qualified to weigh in on it. Obviously, there's people on that side. I think most people who are like, well, but that doesn't mean they're less human. It just means that we took people took different, you know, and as we come to understand more about because there are all of us have non human DNA pretty much to some extent, whether it's Neanderthals or Denisovians or what they call like ghost DNA, which is DNA from a similar to human enough to interbreed, but non human species that less tributated, right? Too well. Now the school is not the same. I know Robert, we all come from, didn't you know, we come from lobsters. Have you heard of George and Peter's? Yes. We do inherit much from the lobsters. We have lobster serotonin is why hierarchies are good. I've always said that. Yeah. Yeah.

35:34So anyway, there's debate about this to this day that I, and I don't think that debate means that anyone's less human than the other. Also, the fucking Denisovians are like Neanderthals were around a day. I would support them having rights because they were clearly intelligent zippian beings. Yeah. All right. Like I understand a bunch of people stand around and thinking like, why the fuck are we all here? What do we do? What do we hear? What do I look different? It's a thing to figure out at a point, right? It's a thing to figure out and it might inform like learning about like basic human nature might inform some things about it today. It's a medicine, right? Much like religion for some people. This is all going back to finding ways to justify your current behavior with these people. Yeah. Right. Is it like I just want a way to justify feeling like I'm the main character in some way. It's the difference between I need to understand the genetics of these people because like sickle salinemia is more common among folks who are inherited or who descended from this line. And we want to cure that. So we need to understand certain things about

36:34genetics in order to try to treat sickle salinemia to being like, oh, well, because those people have this. That means they're less human than me, right? Right. People can take kind of the same starting point. And if you're an asshole, you wind up with bigot. And if you're not an asshole, you wind up trying to solve illnesses. Right. It's why like I know the alpha male thing is the stuff of wolf prison rules or whatever. Right. But it's that same principle, right? Or it's Jordan Beeson with the lobster where it's that I'm going to use this like pseudoscience or even real science to justify why unfair systems exist today. Yeah. And therefore it's natural. You know, yeah, exactly. So the question is not who was like right? Because today we don't call this monogamous to whatever we call it like the out of Africa hypothesis. I forget what the other one is called. But there are still there's still debate. The debate just shouldn't be about like who's a person? Right answer is ultimately is like who gives a shit, right? Like yeah. Yeah. You should give a shit out, but it shouldn't change how you treat people. It's just like

37:36interesting as to like, for example, carrying about like, I don't know which ancient peoples did which genocides to whom doesn't mean that like you support punishing people because they're ancestors. The Assyrians did this thing. Right. Exactly. Well, of course the further we get from all that, it like not that it matters. But it's like, you know, again, the further we get from all that, the more people are going to have to sit around go like, what the fuck are we doing this? Yeah. Podcast. What is this? Yeah. How did this all start? Who's to blame for all of this? But it like it really shouldn't inform the way we treat anybody as the problem. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got your monogamous and you've got your polygenists, right? And Goulton is kind of, he's a polygenist, right? He believes that these other races are not really human beings. And that's part of kind of involved in his like growing atheism in this period of time. Now these are not universal views. As I said, there's a lot of debate and there's debate about how you should treat people and how you should see these different native peoples. One of the first

38:40really popular explorers to counter the attitudes of men like Goulton was David Livingston. If you've ever heard like professor Livingston, I presume, right? Like the guy who like, yeah, yeah, that's David Livingston. I don't know what the fuck that's from. He was a scientist and he was a missionary, right? Who winds up in like the middle of fucking Africa and he gets awarded a medal in 1856 for African exploration. Here's how Schumacher's paper describes his views. He reported being kindly treated by the natives and that they were remarkably civil and generous. Livingston had faith in the edge of ability and the industry of the native races. Richard Burton, also a contemporary of Goulton's, held vastly different views, describing an African tribe, the Juan Yika, as a feudal race of barbarians, drunken and immoral, cowardly and destructive, indolent greedy and thriftless. So if the views on race can be thought of as a, on a continuum then, while not an outlier, Goulton's views of African natives were generally at the negative end and he had little concern about being outspoken and his writings about his beliefs. So guys like Livingston are like, well,

39:40no, these are like people and they're, they're actually like really great. Like, if you get to know them, if you like learn their language, they're pretty chill. Right. You see I did like describing native Americans as like, they're so stoic and serious and angry. It's like, no, they're angry. You, they're pushing you. You fucked them shit up for the man. Like, like, you're describing how they felt about you as if it's what makes up their people. It turns out if you're not a dickhead, they might actually be quite nice to you. Yeah, it'd be like, I came back from a raccoon. It's like, there's something in a racquet culture that makes them really like bottled water and it's like, no, just because of a wide variety of political things, the water's not fucking trustworthy. Like, yeah, a lot of the time and war, stir in areas. So they need to use bottled water. Like, they don't prefer it. It's just that the only option they have, but you're not like, people like him aren't thinking about shit that way. Francis, people like Livingston are, though. So again, you should condemn Gulton and, and Burton and the like for not thinking of shit like this because guys like Livingston are perfectly capable of it. Right. This is a choice people are making to be bigots. Francis returned home to England and time to spend the

40:43Christmas of 1852 with his mother and sister. He met a girl during this visit, Louis Subbutler, and the two were engaged to marry by April of 1853. They traveled some and rented a few places while he kept writing books and doing his research on the increasing obsession of his life. Race. In 1857, he purchased a home in South Kensington and would spend the rest of his life there working as a scientist. He transitioned then from the life of an active explorer to that of a rich man sitting at a high level at the RGS helping to plan out expeditions and then critiquing the failures and successes of the men who actually went out to explore. He wrote one to one younger explorer after, so there's this debate over the origins of the Nile and there's this this legendary explorer, John Hanning Speck, who turns out to be right about where the Nile is, but he winds up in a disagreement with everyone else and the RGS, including, well, a lot of other people in the RGS, including Gulton and Gulton. Eventually, this guy Speck dies, right? He accidentally shoots himself while he's doing one of these hunting chips that these guys are always doing. Afterwards, Gulton writes like a friend

41:48of this dude who is dead. What he could have done and what you can do is to state accurately what you saw, leaving the stay-at-home minute science to co-elate the data. In other words, well, where Speck went wrong is he tried to have ideas of his own. You should leave that to the smart rich guys who don't go out and explore anymore. Leave the smart stuff to us. Don't think about things. Just report. He didn't treat act that way when he was in the field, but that's what he wants other people to do, right? And so Gulton's life went on. Periodically, he took the time to publish articles with his growing theories on race. In the 1859 publication of the origin of species by his older cousin Charles Darwin, electrified and inspired him. And this is what seems to have made him into fully and atheist, right? He reads this book by Darwin and he was like, okay, if that explains it, there's no God. And like a lot of people have that attitude, right? To be fair. Yeah. I have killed God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Darwin got him. Fucking spirit is ass. Darwin had opened his book by discussing the breeding of livestock for specific traits, because

42:51that's relevant when you're talking about natural selection. Gulton was struck with an idea, though, when he read that portion. An idea that hadn't occurred to Darwin, which is like, what if we do that to people? Right? Right. Well, if we can do that to livestock, why can't we breed people to have more traits that we want? Right? What's wrong with that? Right? Yeah. That is dark. This is like a dark story. This is not going to go anywhere bad. Yeah. So he, yeah, he publishes his first writing on what would come to be called eugenics in 1865. This two-part article published in McMillan's magazine was titled Hereditary Talent and Character. And it introduced practical elements of early race science to the educated public. He writes, quote, the power of man over animal life in producing whatever varieties of form he pleases is enormously great. It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeders will. It is my desire to show more pointedly than so far as I am aware has been attempted before that mental qualities are equally under control. Now, I'll point something out here, which is that

43:54there actually already was going on in this period of time and experiment into what if you breed people together who have only the best traits as far as what we rich Europeans consider the best traits. What if you only let those people breed with each other and what happens is you get the Habsburg monarchy like the dead like the Habsburg family who are horribly interbred to the point that like you've got people on the throne not far from this period who are like unable to like function because they're horribly in bread right right like it's not good. It's the thing like these they're not people aren't fucking Pokemon you can't like I don't know. It's not like it just works. He doesn't understand recessive traits right so you've got a smart man it'll make another smart kit right right exactly the problem is he doesn't understand I mean there's a lot of problems but there's one of the problems is like what is a better person. Right. Is it an impossible question and an idea of like someone's decision of what makes a better person is all wrapped up in culture and prejudice

44:57and and all sorts of terrible things and not understanding what it means and like you know capitalism in the system in place and like how a person functions within that none of that means anything. No and ultimately if you if you let the people who have like the most influence over like what gets written and what rich people think is credible determine who gets to breed based on the characteristics they most value you'll get a bunch of people you'll get a country full of nothing but people with substats right right and you won't have anyone who knows that I like make or do anything because these people don't know how to make or do anything right right. I did anything really on his own like it's it's no it's just why diversity is actually strength that's not just a saying is that like no the more yeah the more diverse group of people you have putting their heads together and putting their cultures together and putting their experiences together means that they're better equipped for anything that might happen. It's why for example if you look at like the mathematicians who are going to come about like a hundred

46:03years after this like Albert Einstein not a guy who was bread a guy who came from what he would have considered with Galton would consider inferior gene stock right and when I said Galton ever did anything yeah he does have a lot he makes a lot of advancements and statistics and like math because he's a rich guy everyone listens to he's not the only guy who could have thought of those things he was just the guy that wasn't starving to death with that kind of a mind because he was born rich right that's what I mean like yeah I don't have that much respect for even the good things he did because it was all on fucking easy mode because he was born rich and in charge of the British fucking empire right so the core of this piece that Galton has put together this 1865 article that's like a precursor he hasn't invented the term genetics yet or a eugenics yet they starting to think about it and the core of his argument was that men of good breeding right like he kind of collects a bunch of stories of men of good breeding to see how many times these like men who are like significant have kids who go on to be also significant right so he's trying to prove that great men

47:08are likely to have children who are great men sons he's not really concerned with the daughters but great men are more likely to have sons who are imminent men and that's right and then they have better genes you know what is great it's it's that I guess we're gonna talk about all this it's like if someone's like a successful lawyer right and it's like well he must be a great man and it's like no he's just good at the fake good at making money this way yeah about this thing and he happens to have a lot of money and and he can afford nice things at big part of Galton's calculus is going to be like wow a lot of great lawyers have sons who are great lawyers it must be because genetic right more inclined to be great lawyers and it's like is it that or his dad owned a law firm yeah so he got a really huge leg up right it would be like being like wow there's something in the quay genetics that makes for great actors and that's why Jack quay does been a said like no as Jack quay would say he had a real leg up for a great good actor I like Jack quay but like yeah he's Meg Ryan's son his last names quay it helped the irony here and like this thing listen if you're

48:14rich that doesn't mean your useless piece of shit no no however this line of thinking creates a situation right where like you're actually doing the opposite and by like encouraging like oh these rich people need to have tons of kids because they're a better stock it's like if anything you're putting in more people who don't have to like learn or fight their whole lives who live they are actually doing the opposite it's the difference between. Jared token who writes the Lord of the Rings and is like fucking has to fight in World War One he's not a guy who gets like being a great author handed to him on a platter versus Christopher Peilini the arrogant kid whose parents own like a publishing house and so like when he's a kid and he's probably not really ready he gets like a book published and they're able to like really push it to be very popular it's just less impressive than what Tolkien did because it was handed to this kid right now again it doesn't mean that someone can't be talented it just it actually worsens their odds

49:15it's like when it's like it's like it's like later directors where it's like no one's pushing back on the directors so they can make whatever they want. Why aren't we as impressed by fucking Spielberg anymore you know right why does Megalopolis exist probably because no one was like Coppola no you can't. It's because you hit a certain point of wealth and fame in which you have no more adversity and like art comes from adversity and so does like achievement as a rule it's just less impressive when there's no friction right right and there's never any friction in gold's life and he is as he's trying to prove that like good breeding is what really matters and what makes people great or not he's just looking at other rich people who have lived frictionless existence and like well look at how many of their sons wound up rich and famous too and that's that's really like most of what's going on with his actual like science in this book and it shouldn't be surprising that the inventor of eugenics was a rich kid who inherited his fortune and that he concluded that great men tend to have great children. They came to understand as a result

50:19of this research that breeding or nature was the main and most dominant factor in deciding men's mental capability it's almost the only thing that matters and therefore it makes sense for the state to lavish resources and breeding support not on the poor who are struggling but on the rich and the already successful in order to ensure that they have more kids because that's what'll make society better in the long run. Galton expressed fear that financial constraints and that desire to have a career often kept men of genius celibate during their prime breeding years right they're too busy trying to establish themselves as a in a career and they don't have as many kids as they otherwise would and so he suggests that society should take a role in encouraging and funding breeding between exceptional people. What an extraordinary effect might be produced on our race if its object was to unite in marriage those who possess the finest and most suitable natures mental moral and physical. At one point he tried to calculate the frequency that men of ability are born in the general population and he concluded only one in 3,000 people were

51:21naturally exceptional which means that if you've got three or four exceptional men in the same family just a couple generations that's proof that there are thousands of times genetically superior than the common man right completely ignoring well completely ignoring influence nepotism all of that stuff right um he calculated this and the way he gets this number that one in 3,000 people are exceptional is also complete bullshit because he calculates this by using the number of college students educated in Europe over the last 400 years and comparing that to estimates of the general population right because only all of the exceptional people naturally made it to college there's no exceptional people who didn't get to go to college and for again it's just like self fulfilling it's yeah it's an echo change it's just like every different shit yeah it's fucking a and the second part of that article he suggested selective breeding for positive qualities in some groups and discouraged breeding entirely for other groups and these other groups are nearly

52:23all non-white people that he had zero experience with he never meets any of these people he doesn't know them he doesn't even talk to most of them as Susan Schumacher writes unlike his work with European populations he makes no attempt to provide any evidence for his comments he expounds at length about the American Indian a race he has not interacted with personally and he makes no effort to indicate the source of his information he maintains however that they are cold millen colic patient and taciturn but also patriotic have strong local attachments and a sense of personal dignity as Michael billing comments the prejudices of the exp of the Victorian explorer were raised to the level of immutable biological facts right like he and this is he's not even seeing these people he just heard a description of them and are like ah the red man cold and melancholic and he's like that's their characteristics this has to be everything you need to know about them can't be anything else to learn right it's this guy removed from people that he's standing in front of often right often now like removing himself even more from people and trying to make people

53:27his equations in his head and it is it's one of those things where it's like the idea that any of this thinking would be passed on it's a relational setting is not good it is upsetting is scientific method is of course flawed across the board but while he received some criticism at the time it was usually less dire than modern scientist Ruth Schwarz Cohen's conclusion that quote rarely in history in the history of science has such an important generalization been made on the basis of so little concrete evidence so badly put and so naively conceived I do like that's her discussing his his work here this 1865 article and a lot of his other stuff is that like yeah this is about the most ignorant bullshit that's ever been put turned into science as baby shit yep now one thing positive thing you can say about galtan in this era is that he was not as bad as he would come to be because he doesn't yet think that interracial marriage should be banned categorically and in general he muted his real opinions on race for a while out of fear of public backlash as he

54:29later acknowledged in his autobiography popular feeling was not then ripe to accept even the elementary truths of hereditary talent and character upon which the possibility of race improvement depends still less was it prepared to consider dispassionately any proposals for practical action so I laid the subject wholly to one side for many years right I hid my power level so that people wouldn't know I was a fucking brodo not a little I can't believe you're like he's not as bad as he will be and it's like he's already ordered several monkeys he's killed monkeys he's a sex criminal great yeah he's a sex criminal he he he made a person his pet yeah he's dead in 1869 he published a book hereditary genius that took his initial list of successful men and their offspring and expanded it to collect data on many different kinds of successful people this reinforced his belief that some people are inherently special and he wrote that if the imminent men of any period had been changelings when babies a fair proportion of those who survived and retained their health would

55:32have equally risen to prominence you see this today this attitude like well if you were to take any billionaire and like start them with nothing again at the bottom of society they'd wind up being rich and powerful again because they're just inherently better right I used to be those yes you know you saw the interview of Elon Musk being asked like if you start over with $1,000 and he couldn't even understand the question no it was like oh he can't conceive yeah yeah he was like well I wouldn't have that and it's like yes you idiot we're trying to fucking dipshit yeah yeah yeah and this is these are comforting things to believe that like oh even if I was made to live as a poor person I'd wind up successful again because I'm so inherently good that's comforting if you're one of the most imminent men in your era right right because I get it is like if you become stupid rich you got to tell yourself like that's because I'm so cool I deserve it right and he went on to argue in his book in this book that just as men like him were superior to others in their society his race the white race existed on top of a pyramidal hierarchy and on and he wouldn't have said the white

56:36race right he would have said Anglo-Saxon's because he doesn't believe for example like people in the Balkans maybe even Italians aren't really white to him right oh yeah this is advanced racism this is advanced racism right but as people like him as he is at the top of his own cultural hierarchy people his race is at the top of the global hierarchy of races and at the bottom of course are black people and lowest of all native Australians again it's very funny for a guy to be like hey everybody I did the science I did I spent a lot of time on the side of the best determined that I'm the best as good as against you yeah his arguments here are filled with flawed and faulty logic because quote no man and this is how he argues that like people who are at the top now would always have been at the top quote no man can achieve a very high reputation without being gifted in very with very high abilities and thus few who possess these very capabilities can fail right because anyone who succeeds must have be talented anyone who's talented will always be a success right now

57:39he does make occasional allowances for the fact that being born especially Richard a powerful parents might tip the scales a little but these are never more than cursory gestures and his actual research is universally dog shit his favored kind of imminent man when he's talking about like men of eminence the top kind is a judge because no mediocre man could ever become a judge right it's impossible sure you aren't impressive to be judges all the judges are good um Ajag so he'd saw the fact that many prominent families had multiple imminent members is proof of their inherent genetic superiority poll but per bowl where his biographer he rejected the view that this was due to their having more opportunities of thrusting their relatives into eminence he also stepped into explain points where the facts deviated from his beliefs great military commanders he found rarely had sons who were equally successful now this might be because you that's not really a heritable it's based on like your experiences on like what you're at how you grow up and right like if you

58:40if you become an emperor your kid probably doesn't have to fight his whole life to build an empire and she's just not going to be as good as you right probably you get some exceptions like Alexander right but usually most great military leaders in history are not the sons of equally great military leaders it actually happens fairly rarely and he blames this on the fact that if married at all they're mostly away from their wives on military service now first off this ignores all the rapes that these guys commit as they conquer cities around the world but also even in this period of time reading a book right now called incomparable which is about like Napoleon Bonaparte's the most elite like regiment in his entire army the ninth infantry and like there's tons of stories about guys who've been in the French army for like decades and have like kids and stuff right it's actually like really common even if you're constantly on deployment to have kids and just be a way right that's actually certainly more normal for like officers and stuff than not women though he felt clearly had some direct impact on their sons but he he was never

59:40able to give them as much credit as the men men women and women that's responsible crazy to hear is that the so why oh man the racist guy also hates women oh man also like women wow does he hate them it's just that whenever he has an imminent man whose like sons don't do anything cool he's like well they're mom must have watched it's great man genetics yeah it's also so scientific to be like and surely the women had something to do yeah he is also curious yeah golden as far as I can tell is the first man I'm sure I mean these belief exists it is the first man to try to argue scientifically that women are less suited for science and math and he does this by citing the fact that great scientists credited their fathers and their biographies three times as often as they credited their mothers so obviously Christians can't be passed on by women right wow what a guy where they're where their moms allowed to be site were they allowed to read like he said yeah he said that it's also not his two credits at all the great

1:00:45scientists who credits his early education to a sister hmm do they usually have nothing to do with your inquiring mine Francis like yeah no man well this is the thing about him is like this whole thing is about a guy who you've already brought me through the history of him being like the biggest jackass of his time just the shittiest dick whoever sucked yeah this this perfect storm of mediocre and like evil yeah and then him growing up to be like I think some people are naturally better than others I'm naturally better and it's like your life is roof that's not you in fact or not right now Darwin sent a letter congratulating his cousin on the book her reditary genius golden responded to his cousin with faunting praise saying I used to be wretched under the weight of the old fashioned arguments from design of which I felt though I was unable to prove myself the worthlessness right he's saying like I used to believe in like God had made all and you freed me from that Darwin so I'm just so glad that you you find something valuable in my arguments

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1:03:51and we're back golden's book became influential across a broad swath of an English intellectual life Darwin pronounced that the book had convinced him that education and environment could have only a small effect on the mind of anyone as most of our qualities are innate galtan had his critics though particularly in the religious press one of his more scientifically minded reviewers Herman Mererville published a cogent critique of some of his methodology as bull were describes to illustrate his argument Mererville pointed out that of the 250 clever relations of judges in galtan's list more than a hundred had been lawyers themselves which seemed strange unless we are to assume not only that talent is hereditary but that the special breed of the lawyer is hereditary also oh yeah yeah yeah yeah he drew attention to the family of atkins and galtan's list of judges there have been four judges of the name and let us note in passing nobody except a law student or a painstaking county antiquity has ever heard more than the name of any of them these atkins is

1:04:55are credited with seven or eight remarkable relatives but of these there is only one who was not a lawyer and he was a reader of Lincoln's in this whole list has the un-bestakable character of a snug little family of jobbers rather than a galaxy of genius in other words no one's heard of these judges no one's heard of these lawyers there's no evidence they're good at what they were doing there's just evidence that because some of them were lawyers they made others lawyers it's nepotism there's just evidence of nepotism that's jobbers lawyers it's reinvented our own little language and now we are the best at now we're the smartest yeah the intellect this intellectual monument to self-congratulation is the foundation of eugenic science this is what it's all based on baby galtan expanded on his established habit of throwing as many numbers at the reader as he could gather this is a big part of even today like the modern race I will look at this statistic about I do is a sh** is I can't really tell you that much are the IQ tests good and consistent where are you getting your anyway it doesn't matter for any numbers that I think you smart you know

1:05:57here are sentence no takes a paragraph just hit break up honestly yes you have to hit some people and galtan should have been hit anyway before this had been a myth before this had been a mix of it like before this book his the numbers he threw out because statistics wasn't really all that figured out they'd been a mix of his own primitive attempts at statistical analysis and measurements of people's bodies but between 1865 and the publication of hereditary genius in 1869 galtan learned about gossi and law and started applying modern statistical analysis to his findings often badly but someone else events like figures out and starts writing about this way of doing statistics better and that's what galtan is starting to add to his science in 1869 for example he read about a demonstration by another scientist that showed that height weight and other measurements for a population fell in a bell shaped distribution he extrapolated from these results and observations about grades at Cambridge and he developed an A to G classification

1:06:58of all men on earth according to their natural gifts naturally only white men were capable of reaching the highest categories like f and those were no black people are it reached that of course no black people who are that level right that just doesn't happen this is yeah science science science it's just science that I invented and figured this is cocaine science yeah this is mess science yeah as Schumacher writes as with clear previous articles these assessments appear to be based solely on his own experiences in southern Africa and he makes no attempt to produce a scientific or statistical explanations for his comments one representative example of his logic would be his belief that the least impressive white travelers would automatically hold their own and mentally outfox any African chief even in his home and this is based solely on the fact that galtan was pretty sure he'd once outsmarted an African chief right so any any white guy could do it right yeah this is turning his like random inklings into science he's like I think I could take that

1:08:00guy therefore it's in the textbook did he outsmart this guy of I'm making him sign a shitty treaty or did the guy just know like well this guy is the representative of people with more guns than me this is yeah it's cold thinking right like this is if I started a cult a lot of the stuff I'd write down would just be shit that I think that I believe right yeah like about like oh I think my neighbors are murder okay that's a new commandment like that's just yeah yeah if I was always my version of this scientist based on my own success it'd be like well look obviously if you want to be a success as a writer you've got to lick heroin off of a guy's fingers and rush exactly like it's the only way as far as I'm right based on my sample group of one right yeah exactly it works for you where for me works for everybody they should teach it in like fifth grade should be mandatory yeah the book hereditary genius was a hit but it didn't inspire as I've stated more than a few detractors galt and responded to some of the most prominent criticisms of hereditary genius specifically the idea embodied in her view published by the times of London that universal knowledge of reading

1:09:04writing and ciphering and the absence of popperism would raise the national grade or ability far greater than any and higher than any system of selected marriage right so the again the times of London is like look if we just educate kids and make sure that they're not like starving that will do more than making rich people easier for rich people to breathe which is objectively true and I have to note here that as I wrote this part of the episode I was listening to music and the song flagpole sit up by Harvey danger shuffled on and as I typed the words selected marriage I heard these lyrics that in retrospect describe Francis Galton's intellectual journey journey and thousands fewer words than I've used been around the world and found that only stupid people they're breeding the cleat the Creighton's cloning and feeding and I don't even own a TV right that's got that's gotten baby yeah that's what he believes about the world um man so I have to also note yeah hereditary genius like that is it's a it's a it's a it's a

1:10:05manifesto title or it's like it is it is this is the time the kid who goes up the fly shoot's up a fucking school yeah that are like a pixies album yeah it's yeah it's man what it like the moment someone hands you a book this as I wrote this is called hereditary genius you don't read that you but you burn you burn you make you might burn it yeah you might you throw it right in the fireplace yep in 1873 Galton wrote an article for Frazier's magazine that the website science a q summarized as describing a future in which the genetic elite were incentivized by the state to procreate well the genetically unfit would be barred from reproducing at all in a contemporary letter to the times of London Galton suggested giving Africa to the Chinese theorizing immense gain if Chinese people could outbreed and finally displace Africans which is at least a unique kind of racial ethnic cleansing I haven't heard that specific idea before wait what did he say he wants to replace Africans with Chinese people in Africa because it'll because they're more

1:11:08industrious right it's a weird way to speak for Chinese to yeah it really is that year Galton also first started to speculate about the categories his fellow Britain's might fit into analyzing it describing them with the same tools he developed a categorized native races he disliked what he found too many sickly children were born to narrow chested men and fragile delicate women Galton first came up with a narrow chested man I love that boy yes get it boy boy too many soy boys Evan babies Galton first came up with the infamous term eugenics in the early 1880s when exactly when but it's first published when he's working on a book called inquiries into human faculty and its development as Angela Sinie writes in the book superior Galton coined the term in 1883 from the Greek prefix you for well or good to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations Schumacher gives us somewhat differing account of

1:12:09the origins of the word eugenics in her paper she says he adapted the Greek word eugenics which translated to mean good in stock and hereditaryly endowed with noble qualities meanwhile and handy a lecturer in history of science and medicine and director of the MA program for medical humanities at Birkbeck the University of London gives a third explanation he coined the term eugenics from the Greek meaning well born to determine to describe the betterment of the race through scientific interventions and social controls so there's a little bit of disagreement you know on the specifics here but whatever one agrees is that he coins this term to define the bettering of the race through scientific and social interventions right handly notes that one of his direct inspirations was his cousin Darwin's documentation of breeding pigeons for specific characteristics she adds to facilitate his studies of human difference Galton created the anthropometric laboratory the archives of which are held in the university college London he collected enormous quantities of data to prove that humans were subject to Darwinian natural

1:13:10selection in the same way as plants and animals indeed according to Galton and his followers including Carl Pearson who became the first chair of eugenics at university college London the British race was degenerating right as he starts to turn these techniques he's he's initially developed to analyze these people he's either seen or read about and he turns them onto his own people he starts to realize oh my god these poor people are outbreeding the rich people and that means the British race is going to get weak it's the it's the etiocracy argument right yeah yeah in the 1870s he had formalized the often perverted inclination he felt to measure the anatomies of people to determine their abilities and fitness for breeding and his findings he argued prove that the streets of London were being flooded with subpar people particularly Irish famine refugees who having survived near extinction took on what he described as a negroid look right wow once these people starved death they look like the other starving people I've seen that must mean that they're all genetically inferior as opposed to again now nourished because they haven't

1:14:12had an all malnourished because of people like you yeah he's such a simple guy yeah he's such a simple guy right and he he starts he's not he wasn't just worried that these people are going to outbreed higher quality men and women he's scared that they're going to destroy society his work measuring human bodies let him to be the first scientist to discover and elucidate the principle of statistic correlation and he'd notice that the people who seem to be breeding the most the poor also did the most gambling and commit and fighting and they didn't actually it was incredibly common at the point of time that he was alive for like rich children of rich families to waste their entire fortune gambling that's in cream that's how like all of the rich families of his error are going to lose their money it's like their sons gambling it away right but he's like he just sees the poor people gambling it's different from rich people gambling right right worse and that's probably heritable so we should probably do something about that maybe by stopping certain people from breeding right that's where galtons gonna land and we'll talk more about that in part three but we're

1:15:16done for now Dave how are you feeling I feel invigorated good you know by all this talk of just a terrible you just an awful man an awful man I want to I'm gonna build a cage and I'm gonna find his bones I'm gonna dig him up I'm gonna dig him up I'm just gonna say I'm gonna dig I'm gonna dig him up yeah dig him up and look folks go out and find some bones of your own find someone else's bones someone you think is bad and dig him up that's very unusual I just want to know what they're bones are both narrow-chested men what's happening here because I'm an uncommonly good looking female lunatic and I just want to know are you narrow-chested men or I don't I there's only one way to find out so if he and that's we've got to dig up as many bones as we can uh-huh and we got to measure the shit out of it get your sex stance out and start measuring mother fuckers you know we got a plan we got a plan okay everybody bye

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