Eugenics for your email

You won’t read much about Sir Francis Galton nowadays because, while it’s inarguable that the man was a giant in scores of scientific fields (many of which he invented), it is hard to deny that he was a teensy-weensy bit racist. That he wrote a letter to the Times in 1873 entitled ‘Africa for the Chinese’ is probably as much as you need to know.

At the moment, I can’t find my copy of his 1869 book Hereditary Genius; possibly, along with the rest of my vast library on eugenics, it’s at Der Roryhof, my holiday home perched high on a crag overlooking the Bavarian Alps. But I remembered it when my company updated its email interface last week so ‘Reply all’ was now the default mode of reply.

Galton (who invented the term ‘eugenics’) argued that, in the absence of any Malthusian constraint, people of low-quality stock (cyclists, joggers, etc) rapidly outbreed people of high-quality stock (fat, Jag-driving advertising executives, say). There were two factors driving this trend: the inferior sort of people had more children and — just as important — they bore children younger. In a given unit of time you might have three generations of ad executives with two kids apiece, and six generations of joggers with four children apiece; at which point the joggers’ descendants outnumber the advertising executives’ by 1024:4.

Now it’s clear that Galton can’t have been completely right here; for one thing human intelligence seems to be rising. And, with the lone exception of Anni-Frid from Abba, who was the product of a wartime programme where SS officers were paired with Norwegian women ‘to enrich the Aryan gene pool’, attempts to apply the theory to humans did not go well.

However, when I saw the ‘Reply all’ button it occurred to me that we shouldn’t discard Galton’s theory just yet.