Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [138]
Galton’s name, however, has been tarnished by the recommendations for social policy that he based on his findings and by the meanings history has given to them. It was he who coined the term “eugenics” and who argued, from his first book about hereditary genius in 1869 until his death in 1911, that society would be improved if it encouraged and rewarded the breeding of superior people:
[Eugenics is] the science of improving stock, which…takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.9
This view came to seem horrendous in the wake of Nazi efforts to encourage the procreation of pure “Aryans” and to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and other groups they considered human vermin. Galton himself, according to his biographers, seemed a gentle and decent human being, and certainly not an advocate of genocide, but some of his comments about the proper treatment of undesirable people tread close to the line:
I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continue to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe that the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.10
One might expect a man with such views to have been a racist who saw all human groups other than his own as subhuman, but Galton was not. Although he estimated the average intelligence of blacks as two levels below the English, he rated the English as two levels below the ancient Athenians; he also said that he would have liked to investigate Italians and Jews, “both of whom appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds.”
While Galton’s ideas about eugenics are no part of present-day psychology, they led him to invent some of the field’s most valuable methods of research. The genealogical study of the inheritability of psychological traits is only one of them. Another and even more useful one was inspired by criticisms of Hereditary Genius that pointed to evidence of the influence of environment on intelligence, particularly the statistical findings of the Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, showing that great scientists tend to come from countries with moderate climates, religious tolerance, democratic government, and healthy commercial interests— all environmental influences.
This spurred Galton on to an effort to distinguish the influences of heredity and environment in the achievement of eminence, specifically in science. In 1874, in English Men of Science, he stated the problem very fairly, using a shorthand expression for genetic and environmental influences on development that immediately entered the language:
The phrase “nature and nurture” is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with him into the world; nurture is every influence that affects him after his birth. The distinction is clear: the one produces the infant such as it actually is, including its latent faculties of growth and mind; the other affords the environment amid which the growth takes place, by which natural tendencies may be strengthened or thwarted, or wholly new ones implanted.11
To learn about the part played by nature and by nurture in scientific eminence, Galton invented another new research tool: the self-questionnaire. He drew up a set of questions about the respondent’s racial, religious, social, and