![]() Fisher continued to support eugenics even after the Second World War, by which time it was tainted by association with the genocidal consequences of Nazi race science. Like Galton and Pearson, Fisher applied statistical analysis to problems in the evolution of man and was a leading bio-statistician and geneticist. Fisher was, in 1911, a founding member of the Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose members included John Maynard Keynes. Pearson was succeeded as Galton Professor of Eugenics in 1933 by (Sir) Ronald Aylmer Fisher. He held similar views on discouraging reproduction among ‘the unthrifty … the mentally defective’ and ‘the criminal, the tramp and the congenital pauper’, insisting that the right to live did not confer the right to reproduce. Pearson’s eugenic ideas were based on racist ‘science’ that called for the creation ‘of a homogeneous white race, whose fertility shall markedly dominate that of the black’. Pearson also set up the Annals of Eugenics in 1925. Through the journal Biometrika, with which Galton and Pearson were closely involved, the school promoted the study of biometrics (or mathematical genetics). Pearson renamed it the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics and became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at UCL. When in 1907 Galton stepped down as Director of the Eugenics Record Office, which he had helped to found at University College London (UCL), the statistician Karl Pearson accepted his request to take over. Such ideas were widely taken up by social scientists, politicians and other public figures as well as those involved in medicine and the sciences. However, others were more interested in ‘negative eugenics’ – seeking, by various means, to control the reproduction of the ‘unfit’. ![]() Most of Galton’s practical eugenic suggestions were for so-called ‘positive eugenics’ – the improvement of the race by encouraging those couples deemed worthy to have larger families. The eugenics movement in Britain was complex and crossed party-political divides but was most evident in the work of two organisations formed in the early 20th century: the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics and the Eugenics Society.Įugenicists (also known as eugenists) believed they were applying scientific solutions to social problems. Concerns over the size and fitness of the population were not new and the backdrop for the growth of eugenics was a period of enormous social and economic change. In its early years, eugenics was dominated by a small and esoteric elite group, which sought ‘scientifically’ to establish ideas about inherited characteristics and abilities that were closely linked to social class and race. The statistician and explorer Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a cousin of Charles Darwin and, in common with other thinkers from this time, began to apply Darwin’s theories of natural selection to the human race.
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