2.1 Francis Galton, the father of eugenics

Imagine you’re in London in 1884, walking through the International Health Exhibition. In a room called the “Anthropometric Laboratory,” you come across the scientist Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin — measuring how strongly a woman can pull the string of a bow, the arm span of a child, and the height of a man. Galton repeats these and many other measurements on more than 9,000 visitors, collecting them in an anthropometric catalogue — a word that comes from Greek which means “measurement of humans.”

Inspired by Darwin’s work on the survival of the fittest, Galton theorised that the human species could be “improved” through the reproduction of individuals from supposedly “superior” bloodlines. Using the anthropometric catalogue, he aimed to classify the population and identify “desirable” traits — chosen according to classist and racist criteria. One of these traits was intelligence, which he associated with abstract thinking and energy. The test in front of you is an example of the methods he used to measure it.

Galton called his theory eugenics, from the Greek eu and ghénos, meaning “good lineage.” But eugenics did not remain just a theory: it paved the way for the racist policies of the 20th century, culminating in the horrors of Nazism.