In my post the other day about Monsters, I wrote about “scientists who held political views that you might now call odious, such as Francis Galton’s racism (which, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s views, were close to the core of his statistical work) or J. B. S. Haldane’s communism (which seems more peripheral to his contributions to biology, although I expect that Haldane himself saw some connections there).”
A colleague who knows more about Galton than I do argued that the core of Galton’s statistical work had nothing to do with eugenics, even by Galton’s definition. It had been my impression that even when Galton was writing about heights of siblings or whatever, that eugenics was not far from his concerns, but according to my colleague, Galton’s work on correlation was originally motivated by trying to understand the paradoxes of evolution (not “eugenics,” particularly) and “when he had his breakthrough he saw that it was not heredity at all – it was a general statistical phenomenon.” My colleague continued, “Galton’s 1st book can be called eugenic – it said talent runs in families. But it had no effect. Why? Because everybody ‘knew’ that. He got no response and he moved on – he didn’t change his views but he moved on to other questions with no eugenical side.”
From a modern perspective, I can’t see how you can avoid labeling Galton as racist. For example, he charmingly wrote:
Visitors to Ireland after the potato famine generally remarked that the Irish type of face seemed to have become more prognathous–that is more like the Negro in the protrusion of the lower jaw. The interpretation of that which was that the men who survived the Starvation and other deadly accidents of that horrible time were generally of low and coarse organization.
Talk about adding insult to injury! Starve a country and then say that the survivors have been selected to be “low and coarse.”
Also this:
Average negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and support.
And:
The Hindoo cannot fulfil the required conditions nearly as well as the Chinaman, for he is inferior to him in strength, industry, aptitude for saving, business habits, and prolific power. The Arab is little more than an eater up of other men’s produce; he is a destroyer rather than a creator, and he is unprolific.
Lots of people back in the 1800s wrote like that, and I don’t know enough about that period of history to assess the ways in which Galton was more or less racist that other educated Englishmen of his time. Perhaps one thing that disturbs me about Galton is that this was not just casual racism, just some guy in the pub making Irish jokes, but rather his carefully-thought-out views. But this is different from my colleague’s point about Galton’s statistical work, which is that it moved away from concerns about evolution and heredity and toward more general mathematical understanding of regression and correlation. It should be possible for me to be bothered by Galton’s racial views and to be bothered by their political implications, and to be interested in the connection between racist attitudes and the history of statistics, while also recognizing the development of ideas of correlation and regression on their own terms.
Also, to get back to the racism, the notorious Galton quotations above are from a lot of writing that he produced during his life. These remarks might well represent something close to his max level of racism rather than the mean or median. And such beliefs did not necessarily get in the way of his scientific investigations. For example, my colleague informed me, “When Galton first looked at fingerprints he also looked for a possible difference between African and English prints – were the first group less evolved (simpler) than the second? He could see no such difference. He once wrote (in 1863), ‘Exercising the right of occasional suppression and slight modification, it is truly absurd to see how plastic a limited number of observations become, in the hands of men with preconceived ideas.’ Evidently Galton had no such preconceived idea.” In some sense his rejection of a racial idea in this case was even more impressive, if he indeed came into the analysis expecting to see such a pattern.
Again, no need to single out Galton; he gets more of our attention because of the importance of his contributions to statistics. Casual racial thinking comes up all the time in the history of quantitative social and biological sciences. For example, in his 1957 book, Probability, Statistics, and Truth, Richard Von Mises attempted to explain an underdispersion in the monthly rates of girl and boy births as being caused by different sex ratios among different racial or socio-economic groups; see pages 84-85 of this article. Mises does not present a rigorous argument, and if you try to look at it carefully, the math breaks down; my point is just that, when coming up with an apparently unexpected pattern in social data, he reached for a racial explanation. The question is not whether he was a “racist” in whatever terms might be used–according to wikipedia, he left Germany after the Nazis took power–just that racial thinking was in the air.
As we’ve discussed in other contexts, the point of this discussion is not to characterize Galton as “good” or “bad” but rather to better understand his statistical and his racial views in context. History is important.
It sure seems like Galton would have flunked the implicit bias test. But whether that tells us more about Galton or about the test, I’m not sure. Connecting observations with demographic profiles seems only natural – I really don’t see how we can do otherwise, and I believe it serves evolutionary purposes. The real question, I believe, is how/whether those connections lead to actual behaviors. In this case, was Galton’s statistical work influenced by such implicit biases? I have no personal knowledge to contribute regarding this, but it would seem that you are saying that there was no apparent evidence of such a connection. That mirrors my own take on the implicit bias test: finding that I have such bias does not mean that I act on it (at least in any meaningful and/or harmful way).
The definitive work, in my eyes, on this subject is
“Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge”
By: Donald MacKenzie
I once interviewed him decades ago, and from what I recall, he feels that the racist stuff as motivation petered out after a while. He is now interested in ultrafast algorithms and the stock market.
Some of those eugenicists were literally myopic and Galton did have fainting spells; Fisher’s poor eyesight was legendary.
One aspect of the idea of “racism” which is very difficult to discuss, since it’s such a contentious topic, is that there’s more and less extreme versions of it. There’s a very common reaction to assert that only the most extreme meaning counts, and anything less doesn’t qualify (commonly, there’s a GOTCHA!-type argument that some people use the term overbroadly). One joke I have about this dispute, that only this blog audience may get, is it’s an argument over the placement of the median of the supposedly different black/white IQ “Bell Curve” – a difference of two standard deviations == “racism”, one standard deviation is deemed as not “racism” but “biodiversity” (sarcasm).
This only-most-extreme is evident in “The question is not whether he was a “racist” in whatever terms might be used – according to wikipedia, he left Germany after the Nazis took power …”. I don’t think it’s necessary be a literal bona-fide Nazi to be fairly described as “racist”. The Nazis were extreme even for racists. Plenty of people have believed in genetically superior and inferior races, without going so far as to advocating killing all the inferior races (if you kill them, who does all the scut-work?). And this moves naturally into eugenics, as in figuring out exactly how to scientifically discover the bad racial aspects and “improve” them.
There’s some real intellectual substance here which gets lost in the noise.
Well, the whole reason people were thinking about the “paradoxes of evolution” is that Darwin’s theories presented all sorts of problems for European hierarchies of racial superiority. Galton’s whole career was centered on eugenics even if he might also be interested in statistical problems that didn’t have immediate eugenic applications. He certainly didn’t “move on” but kept working on eugenics, directing laboratories, founding organizations, writing books, giving lectures…for instance:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_Laboratory
Galton’s own Wikipedia page gives a pretty good survey of his career.
If I remember “The voyage of the Beagle” correctly, Darwin also wrote racist things, although he opposed slavery and was livid about the way slaves were treated in Brazil. In discussing that, he also wrote “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin,” but in context it seems pretty clear that he thought the laws on nature were involved there somewhere — he seemed to think it perfectly normal that someone else should carry his bags.
Generally, we should watch out for presentism, and judge people as people in terms of the conditions and standards of their time. For example, during the Great Depression, communism seemed like a good idea to a lot of good people (I knew a bunch of them growing up), so Haldane’s politics should be viewed in that light.
John:
Yes, it’s good to know that these historical figures held these public beliefs, not necessarily as a way to criticize them so much as to better understand them and their times.
Seth, as a practical matter, “implausibly large effect sizes” are a good hint that someone is trying to fool you. So I am comfortable looking at a summary of Richard Lynn’s claims about national IQ, laughing like mad, and ignoring them thereafter, whereas there are other claims about race and IQ which deserve detailed rebuttals. I would agree that a lot of cranks try to get people to accept the reality of racial differences in traits as a camel’s nose in the tent for their full argument about hierarchies of worth with black Africans at the bottom and white Europeans near the top. So they absolutely do propose small differences between some populations in some traits in hope that once those are accepted they can propose the big differences that they really care about. Back in Galton’s day this was not necessarily and you could just publish racist claptrap in all kinds of places and get a respectful response (IIRC it was in the 1920s and 1930s that the weight of the evidence started to pile up against race theory).
Galton was not fond of those deemed socially “above him” either. Nor, was he fond of religion. Here is one of his arguments refuting the power of prayer–back then, praying for the health of the Royal Family was a common occurrence and his data countered the notion that prayer was effective
https://galton.org/essays/1870-1879/galton-1872-fortnightly-review-efficacy-prayer.html
“The sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence. The prayer has therefore no efficacy, unless the very questionable hypothesis be raised, that the conditions of royal life may naturally be yet more fatal, and that their influence is partly, though incompletely, neutralized by the effects of public prayers.”
For a more modern version of the power of prayer, there is the famous controversial version by Leonard Leibovici
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/323/7327/1450.full.pdf
By all means, after you have read it, search around for the comments it engendered.
You draw some questionable inferences. Maybe Galton was just trying to objectively test common beliefs in the power of prayer. It does not mean he dislikes royalty or religion.
Roger:
I’m not a Galton expert but from what I’ve heard, I think he did express skepticism about both royalty and religion.
paul alper – it seems like there’s many additional variables we need to consider regarding the “prayer hypothesis”. Why assume everyone is actually praying for the health of the sovereign? I would expect there’s quite a large number of people praying for the sovereign to die, and not willing to admit it. Additionally, do everyone’s prayers count equally? Perhaps there’s an effect depending on how well the pray-er knows the pray-ee (which could mean a bunch of immediate family fervently hoping the old bastard would kick off already, would factor in highly). Or maybe some people are much better skilled at it (e.g. priests are better than ordinary people since they’re more in tune with how to make requests for divine intervention). I think a better argument might be the reverse, that e.g. Henry Kissinger lived to be 100.
Seth:
Indeed, once you start playing the game of coming up with scientific-sounding explanations for supernatural claims, there’s no stopping point. I’m reminded of the argument that in an ESP study the experimenter can alter the randomization via subconscious telekineses, or that in a prayer experiment the gods can manipulate the result by the simple means of causing data-recording errors in key places.
This Nature article is a good and fair discussion about R.A.Fisher’s eugenics work and how it was influenced by Galton.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-020-00394-6
Here is a quote from this article.
Galton introduced the word eugenics as follows: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea;” (Galton 1883, pp 24–25). The aim of eugenics was therefore to be the “science of improving [the human] stock”.
Here is another quote to perhaps balance the previous one and it alludes to Andrew’s previous comment of understanding the context of ideas from past thinkers which in turn makes us think of our own modern ideas and their context – especially in the frontier of AI.
“In one of Fisher’s last papers celebrating the centenary of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and commenting on the early Mendelian geneticists’ refusal to accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection he said, “More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning track or stopped short of the right” (Fisher 1959). Here, then, there is a lesson for us. Rather than dishonouring Fisher for his eugenic ideas, which we believe do not outweigh his enormous contributions to science and through that to humanity, however much we might not now agree with them, it is surely more important to learn from the history of the development of ideas on race and eugenics, including Fisher’s own scientific work in this area, how we might be more effective in attacking the still widely prevalent racial biases in our society.”
Was Galton actually a supporter of governments implementing centrally-planned eugenics programs? Or did he just think humans could be bred same as dogs to have certain traits?
Not all politics put only a narrow window between “seems like a good idea” and “government should try to implement it”. Some do, and those are the scary ones. Eg, who decides what is “good”?
And the US government is still all about eugenics, just look at how much race stuff is in government datasets. What is it for? Or the huge role abortion plays in politics. However, after the earlier “excesses” they take a more “manufacturing consent” (or “nudge”) approach.
I don’t get your reference to race in government data sets. It could be related to eugenics, but it certainly has a basis in medicine (race is relevant to medical conditions and treatments). Given the history of slavery and racism, social and economic outcomes are also related to race and without collecting such data, it would be impossible to examine such issues. You appear to know something about government intentions that I wish you would be explicit about. I am certainly prepared to believe that eugenics is a policy for some elected officials, but that is a far cry from “the US government is still all about eugenics.”
Choose any government dataset, 90% chance there is some racial distinction in there I (a typical non-obsessed person) would need to look up. This racial obsession has always disturbed me.
It goes well beyond anything that could be related to superficial racism.