“It was explicitly White supremacist.” Like so many before and after him, Galton’s idea of improving humanity meant removing people who were different from him. “Galton’s racism was deep, consistent and robust, even for his era,” Rutherford writes. It was an intention shared by many, but Galton’s name was formally removed from UCL premises in 2020 because of the role he’d played. He gave a name – from the Greek, roughly meaning “well born” – to a discipline that aimed to improve humanity at the population level. Francis Galton was the father of modern eugenics. He begins with a potentially controversial admission: “All science is political.” His own undergraduate study took place at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, an institution with a unique perspective on how scientific endeavour can be sullied by political ideology.
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