Galton, Sir Francis (1822-1911)
Galton, Sir Francis (1822-1911)
Scientist and explorer, born in Birmingham, West Midlands. He studied at Birmingham, London, and Cambridge, but left the study of medicine to travel in N and S Africa. He is best known for his studies of heredity and intelligence, such as Hereditary Genius (1869), which led to the field he called eugenics . Several of his ideas are referred to in the works of his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton was knighted in 1909.
It should be noted that "eugenics" literally means "good genes". The terms applies equally well to Plato's Republic as well as to Hitler's program of global extermination of all non-caucasian humans. In one of his later works, Twillight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche railed against Aryianism (class consciousness and caste systems) and extolled the opposite principle - "miscegenation" or race-mixing - as the antidote to rabid nationalism.
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