Part Two: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

In part 2, we follow Galton during his youthful rampage through the middle east and then Africa, and how his 'gap years' created the racism we all live with today. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Cool Zone Media.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, we're starting our series on Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. And boy, what a wonderful day for an actual eugenicist, Milo Yiannopoulos, to have just gotten taken into custody by ICE for overstaying his immigration visa. And look, listen, folks, if someone, if you, if, if, if you're one of the people who's being like, we shouldn't laugh, and Milo Yiannopoulos being, being taken into custody by ICE, I want to read you a post Milo made a couple of years ago. What is the etiquette if you're going about your business and find yourself observing an ICE raid? I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand in the street? Or should you find some

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  kind of awning or motor vehicle? No, it's really funny and good that he, that he got taken into custody by the exact people who, who he enabled and cheered on his entire life. And now he's stuck in immigration jail, looking like shit. You can see his fucking mugshot right now. We'll make sure we put that on the YouTube. Otherwise, just look it up. Fuck him.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. It just because like, you can laugh at leopards eating someone's face. That doesn't mean you like leopards eating everybody's faces, right? It's just.

• 1:15Robert Evans?

  I tried, we tried to stop the leopards from eating anybody's face, Milo. You were on Team Leopard, and now they're eating your face. And I just feel nothing for you. Nothing but joy. Because again, you're also a eugenicist, like Francis Galton, the subject of our episodes, but not like David Bell, the guest of our episodes. David, you're not a eugenicist, right?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  No, I'm very moist right now, though.

• 1:37Robert Evans?

  You are moist. That's good. That's good.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  It's because in the last episode, my cat was on the desk and I got him off and he spilled my Red Bull everywhere. I didn't realize until, until later. So I smell, I, yeah, I smell awesome. I smell radical. Yeah. I smell extreme.

• 1:57Robert Evans?

  Again, this is why Francis Galton was a eugenicist. If, if, if we had just applied more eugenics, you could have had a cat that doesn't knock things over, probably. It has to exist. I actually don't think that does with the cats.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I think they have to not have legs.

• 2:11Robert Evans?

  I don't think you could breathe that into cats.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  I don't think there's any amount of the cat genome. I think every individual, like divisible chunk of the cat genome includes the knock shit off of a counter because it's fun gene. Like, I just think that's, that's integral to being a cat.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  I get it. Like, if you don't know what gravity is, you, you can still see it. And you're like, that's awesome. Gravity's awesome.

• 2:34Robert Evans?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It's like throwing things down.

• 2:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:41Speaker 03

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• 2:45Robert Evans?

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• 3:44Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 3:59Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 4:25Speaker 07

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But someone will find it.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And I says, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:07Robert Evans?

  And speaking of beings without a conscience, who are just doing shit to watch what happens, Francis Galton is touring the Middle East and North Africa, committing every kind of sin imaginable.

• 5:19Robert Evans?

  He next visited Syria, where Ali slash Bob, the little, the coffee boy that they were traveling with, takes ill. And, oh, yeah, no, he dies of what Francis describes as violent dysentery.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  When you gave the kid a name, I was like, this can't end well for the kid.

• 5:38Robert Evans?

  He's gotta die a horrible death. Now, Galton pays for the tombstone, but writes that he doesn't attend the funeral because his presence as a Christian, quote, "would have been seriously resented by the Muslims." And I know that it's common today. And first of all, I just need to say, that's, that's not true, right? It's not true that there's some sort of, like, wider prejudice among Muslims as a group against Christians or members of other faiths attending funerals, or other, like, like a birthday or something like that of the like, right? Wedding, similarly. It's been very common for a very long time, in a lot of areas at least, for those to be interfaith events if it's a mixed community that the people live in, right?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Sure. That said, yeah, I do think Ali's family probably didn't want him.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  That's what happened, right? He's saying is like Muslims just don't want Christians, or I think it's that they don't want you. And it wasn't his family.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Oh, you're Muslim, you don't want Christians there. And them going like, yeah, let's go with that. Let's go with that.

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, let's say that. Yeah, let's say whatever keeps you away. And these are not his, Ali's family. These are just some random Muslims who know that a Muslim has died away from his home, and that these white people aren't going to do anything to give him a proper burial, right? That's what's happening here. My, I will say, in terms of looking into this, I did look into, like, was it permissible in the past for members of other, and like, as far as I can tell, yes, it certainly is today. Crescent Funerals, a Muslim funeral provider in Leicester, England, says it's fine on their website. I found a bunch of, like, Muslim religious scholars saying stuff like, yeah, if, like, your, your mom isn't Muslim and she dies, or like, a friend, you can go to their funerals. It's like, cool, like, God isn't angry about that. He judges people. It's not for us to do. That's the general attitude.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Seems like most religions has those things, right?

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Who gives a shit, man?

• 7:30Robert Evans?

  Who gives a shit, man? You gotta live your life. Like, yeah. I think that's what's going on. I think they didn't want him there because they knew he was a dick. And I think that that's, I'm not being presumptive by saying, I don't think he was allowed at the funeral because he was too much of an asshole. In order to kind of make the case that he was probably being a gigantic asshole, I want to read you something he wrote in 1885 about his travels during this time. This is him as an older man, looking back on his travels through the Middle East. And this is what came to his mind. "Such a difference between the Berbers and the Egyptians. You cannot strike a Berber, but may flog as many Egyptians and beat them with sticks as much as you like. They are thoroughly slavish." So, when I say I think he wasn't allowed at the funeral because he was, this is what he remembers

• 8:15Robert Evans?

  about the time, is the people you can and can't beat with a stick. That's what he remembers from his vacation. Now, the Berbers don't let you beat them. The Egyptians do.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  He would be at the funeral, like, using the boy as the chair for.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he'd be fucking hitting people with this corpse.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Slapping the boy's corpse, just having a grand old time.

• 8:39Robert Evans?

  Like, that's what he took out of the whole country of Egypt, is you can really flog the shit out of these people. They don't do anything, huh?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I feel like there's gotta be a lot of, like, customs being used this way. It's like the drinking age in Canada. It's like, they're not going to bring it up unless you're an asshole. I can see a lot of that, right? A lot of, actually, it's our custom that you get the hell away from us.

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, our custom is you leave immediately. That's our weird Muslim thing, is get the fuck out of my house.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:10Robert Evans?

  So Galton claimed to have sent Ali's property and due wages, the money that he'd earned so far, to his wife in Cairo after he died, along with a little present for herself, and thought his duty fulfilled. "This is clearly all I'll need to do." Alas, he writes, he'd, quote, "roused a hornet's nest of greedy claimants, demanding payment to various relatives. His banker advised him to 'get out of the reach of the law as soon as I conveniently could.'" And that's why he ends his trip in 1845? It's because he stiffs this dead kid's family and they're trying to pursue him for justice?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Right. He's, he frames that like he's being attacked, but he's like, and then, in order to remedy this, I had to get away from the law.

• 9:51Robert Evans?

  I had to flee the country.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Okay, well, it sounds like a crime spree.

• 9:54Robert Evans?

  Sounds like you committed a lot of crimes, Francis. It's like, maybe you killed this kid. I don't know.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Put it past him. If I was, man, if he was like, I'm sending you a little gift, I'd be like, no, I don't even want to know what you consider a gift.

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  Your husband's died. Here's a little present for yourself. I got you some perfume. Like, what?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I would not put that perfume on me.

• 10:16Robert Evans?

  No.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  I don't know what it would be.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's what killed my husband. Now, he sails home with two living tokens of his travels. He takes open some, home some like, living souvenirs, a pair of monkeys. Uh, and he's allowed to take them into England. They're supposed to go into quarantine, but he's a rich white man. So, nobody makes him obey the law. However, upon his return to England, quote, "On a chilly November day, I failed to find a comfortable night's lodging for my pets, but an old friend who was living in apartments kindly undertook their charge. He handed them with many instructions to his landlady, who thought and perhaps said, 'Drat the beasts and shut them up in the cold scullery, where they were found the next morning dead in one another's arms.'" Jesus.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Honestly, that was, yeah, that's the leak. That's like, they died Titanic style.

• 11:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, hugging each other for warmth. My God, cuz you wouldn't put them in your room? And you're blaming it on his landlady? Like, they're your monkeys.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  That, I expected that to go worse, to be honest.

• 11:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Like, I knew the monkeys were gonna die no matter what happened.

• 11:21Robert Evans?

  A quick death is probably the best.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  We're gonna go to.

• 11:24Robert Evans?

  There's a sense of euphoria I think you do get when freezing to death that I've read about. So, that, of the ways a pair of monkeys could die in London in the mid 1800s.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:34Robert Evans?

  Probably one of the more merciful things that's quick. Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  He's just, so it's funny cuz like, I guess this is true for many of your episodes, but it's, it feels very true here where it's like, when you bring a bad person on, a lot of the bad shit they do is often around like a specific theme of, of things they believed in. This guy's just an asshole.

• 11:58Robert Evans?

  And that's, I was worried.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  He's just a dumb asshole, right?

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  Like, if you, if you read the summaries of Galton's life, it'll always be he invented and it'll list all these different mathematical innovations and science, cuz he invented a lot of important stuff. And then also eugenics, like he was a real, he was a racist, but a scientific racist. And the way, again, the summaries make it feel is that like, well, he was an educated man of a different time who came to believe something bad. But there's people like that who are not, I mean, you can say they're a bad person because they do believe a terrible thing and it leads them to...

• 12:29Speaker 02

  But they're not killing monkeys through negligence.

• 12:31Robert Evans?

  Personally vile every moment of his life. As far as I can tell, Francis Galton was an obscene human being every moment of his adult life. Like, just a thorough sinner, like a vile man to his core. As bad as it could be.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Special kinda asshole where like,

• 12:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Everything he does is like adjacent to something awesome that somebody could do. Like, I'm all for bringing some monkeys home, you know?

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Sure, take some monkeys to England, that does sound like a good time.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and listen, if the monkeys get loose and do a light rampage, then so be it.

• 13:03Robert Evans?

  Sure, sure, yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Then the fate of the monkeys is, it's so scummy.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  It's so evil and lazy.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  The monkeys and they die.

• 13:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It, yeah, I was worried he would be like, I would have to do a lot of like arguing with him and proving the science wrong in order to make it clear what a bad man he was. And no, just his life makes that clear. He was a fucking monster. He was an abominable person. And I, I should note here, because Galton was a statistics nerd, he might've found it interesting cuz I counted. He spends 70 words discussing the deaths of two monkeys and 17 discussing the death of Ali, a human being.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Not surprising.

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  Not surprising.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Honestly, not surprising at that man.

• 13:43Robert Evans?

  Not surprising at all.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  He named the child.

• 13:47Robert Evans?

  He, he named, he gave him a different name.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Named it, yes.

• 13:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so Francis spins the net, well, not, I don't know if it was a child cuz he had a wife. I don't know what age, he says coffee boy, but they call a lot of adults who aren't white boy. I think that's what the boy meant, right?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  I don't know if that's worse, but yeah, that makes sense.

• 14:06Robert Evans?

  He had a wife.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  He could've been, he could've been 45 for all he was.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Who knows, given the way these people talk, yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  Francis spent the next few years living the life of an English gentleman, shooting and fishing from Wales to Scotland and learning the ABCs of life in the English countryside. He writes that like, "I didn't know how to be an English gentleman cuz I never had had to be before my dad died, so he has to figure that out now." And when he describes what he had to learn, it's how to shoot things. That's all there is, aside from dressing right and being polite in public. It's just shooting. That's all being an English gentleman is, is shooting different things. Bowyer writes of this time, "He was invited to shoot on a friend's grouse moor in Scotland and spent a summer in the Shetland, seal shooting and bird nesting."

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 14:49Robert Evans?

  I should note here, I don't know, it, it does look like the Scottish seals are endangered right now, although I don't know if they were in his time, so that may not be on him. But the black grouse nearly went extinct in Scotland during this period of time because of guys like, because of Galton and guys like him. Uh, anyway, "After several restless years of shooting animals and reading books, Galton decided to undertake a proper expedition to Africa in 1850." And by this point, he's evolved enough as a person, I think he's pushing 30 at this point. He no longer wants to be a tourist, right? He wants to be an explorer. Schumacher notes this, uh, in her dissertation, uh, and this is what he wrote about his motivations in 1849. "Blank spaces in the map of the world were both large and numerous,

• 15:33Robert Evans?

  and the position of many towns, rivers, and notable districts were untrustworthy. The whole interior of South Africa, and much of that of North Africa, was quite unknown to civilized men." Right, so there's just not maps of this area that people do have been living in for forever. And that's what he wants to go over there, is to make like maps of these, these blank spaces.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Could he not?

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Could he just not?

• 15:54Robert Evans?

  Could he not?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Everything like now, I'm off to Africa and it's like, don't, man, son of a bitch.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  I'm not anti, obviously, like, it's good that scientific maps that are like universal around the world exist now. That's a positive change.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  No, it's him specifically.

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  Didn't need to be him.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like, you ever have like that scumbag friend who's just like, "I'm gonna become a mall Santa," and you're like, no, oh, please.

• 16:19Robert Evans?

  Really?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  Are you, are you allowed to be around kids again? I thought that was like a five year, okay.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Robert Evans?

  So, I talked recently about Percy Fawcett, who's an explorer from like a generation or two after Galton's heyday. And that he was doing the same thing. He was another monster who went to go make maps of places that didn't have maps. Francis was right at, but not quite at the start of the quest to map the world. And like most things in life, in his life, he secured his initial in to the Royal Geographic Society via nepotism because his cousin was a prominent member. He gets everything in his life through nepotism. Very important part of the Francis Galton story. He does not ever in his entire life earn a single thing just on his personal merit. Never once.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  He doesn't try once.

• 17:02Robert Evans?

  Never once. He does try, but he tries with significant effort. It's like trying to be nine foot tall when you have a ladder, right?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, "The society helps him plan his first expedition to map chunks of West South Africa. Over the next two years, he had repeated contact with three different groups of native people. The Nama were heavily employed as servants by the Dutch and thus were quite westernized. The Herrera and Avambo weren't." In her dissertation for the University of Canterbury, Susan Schumacher dissummarizes his impressions of these different peoples. "Galton was unimpressed with the Nama and felt superior to them as he outsmarted the current chief, Jankar Afraconner, and managed to secure both passage for himself and convince the chief to sign up to a Western-style legal code, which prescribed Jankar's behavior particularly against the Herrera, whom they were murdering and stealing cattle from at the time. Galton also disliked the Herrera.

• 17:54Robert Evans?

  While he considered them to be aesthetically pleasing, magnificent models for sculptors, he was critical of their moral and intellectual attributes. Describing the Herrera, or Damaras as he called them, he writes, "There is hardly a particle of romance or affection or poetry in their character or creed, but they are a greedy, heartless, and silly set of savages. The Damaras have a vast number of small superstitions, but they are all stupid and often very gross, and there's not much that is charismatic to, that is characteristic in them." So, again, he doesn't speak their language. He doesn't really know anything about their art or culture. He's meeting these people as part of a surveying mission and trying to like get them to sign treaties to help like the local colonials. This is the same as if someone had met Galton and his friends

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  when they were murdering and whoring their way through North Africa and been like, ah, so this, this says everything, Europeans don't make art. All they do is just molest people and like, well.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Kill monkeys occasionally.

• 18:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's more to the culture than just Francis Galton, right?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's lost all privileges here to judge anything.

• 18:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, given his fucking behavior.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:00Robert Evans?

  The only local peoples Galton liked were the Avambo, which again are the people who were like commonly used as slaves and servants by white people in the area. And so, they're very westernized. He referred to them and praising them as being very domestic. And he applauded the lack of pauperism in the country. That means everyone's working for white people. So there's not anyone unemployed because any black person who doesn't work for a white person is unemployed. Right? That's his attitude. And even though he likes the Ovamo, he still talks at length about how ugly he finds them. And he slander, he specifically, he talks a lot negatively about their women in particular. He really likes to comment negatively on how gross he thinks specific women are.

• 19:43Robert Evans?

  He puts this in his like scientific papers home about like his, his investigations of this culture. Galton returns home to Europe after this journey more racist than ever and a hero for his groundbreaking exploration of South Africa. He receives a society gold medal. And the year after he got back, he wrote a book about his experiences that became a bestseller all across England. Critics at the time did note that he really seemed to have some very strong and very specific opinions about the native people. His scientific recollections are replete with descriptions of, in the case of the Ovamo, ugly, bony men. But he again, saved specific graphic distaste for the Ovamo women, who he described as decidedly nice looking.

• 20:26Robert Evans?

  Their faces were open and merry, but they had rather coarse features and shone all over with butter and red pigment. They have like cosmetics that they apply to themselves that he gets like stains his nice linen clothing when he's trying to molest them and that really upsets him.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  Galton also exhibited a fascination with measuring and quantifying the bodies of native peoples. He likes to measure them to like determine how long their arms are and their, he's, this is pre eugenics. He's doing this before that. He's just fascinated in measuring people. He would later justify this by his work in eugenics and his standing as a prominent race scientist. But his writing at the time, before he comes up with those things, proved that his initial interest in measuring people is not scientific. It's sexual. In his biography of Galton, Bowyer writes about the time Francis used his quote sextant for an unusual purpose. And a sextant is like a tool that you use generally when you're on a boat and stuff, but it's for like determining like where you are. Right?

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  It's a navigational tool, but you can use it to determine like distance and stuff. So you could use it to like figure out measurements. I don't, I'm not, I don't understand the math. Right? But what happens is that while he's visiting the Herrero, Galton meets the wife of his interpreter. And this lady is really hot. He describes her as a Venus among the hottentots. Right? The hottentots are the Herrero. And a Venus is a European, like Venus is the European god of like beauty and, or not European, but the Greek god of beauty and love. And for, by this point in time, because they're not pagans, but the, the term a Venus is a term anyone in Europe would recognize as a hot lady. Right? That's what he's saying is she was hot. Right? So there's this hot lady who's the wife of his interpreter.

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  And he, uh, he's, as soon as he looks at this woman, he describes himself as being perfectly aghast at her development. He's talking about like her measurements. Right? She's got a large breasts. Right? That, that's what he's talking about. Right? So he inquires of his white friends and he told, they told him that she was quote, "The lady who ranks second among her people for the beautiful outline that her back affords." In other words, her really, she's got the second best ass in the tribe is what the white people say of this woman, which gives you an idea of how common it is to sexualize these people among the whites.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Is it? Yeah. Here's, I guess, here's the question.

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  This does feel, this feels like 4chan incel speak. You know what I mean?

• 22:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's all the Europe, baby.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  I, yeah. And I know it's like probably how they talked back then. This is the equivalent of him saying like, she's got some sweet milkers or whatever. But like it's, it's feels grosser. It feels grosser.

• 23:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  It's what he's doing too, is like, there's certain industries, right? Where like, like the, you know, you ever hear, you always hear those stories about like a fertility doctor impregnating a bunch of women. And it's those occupations where I feel like when someone was like, I want to be a fertility doctor, the first question you have to ask them is why?

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  Why? Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  I don't, we, I mean, we, our episodes on fertility doctors are literally all fertility doctors are bastards because it keeps happening. Not to all of them, but a lot.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Right. It's one of those industries where it's like, listen, there are people who are like, I believe in this and I want to help families, but you're gonna get some freaks. And I feel like the medical industry has done a better job over the years of weeding out, you know, serial killers and, and rape.

• 23:55Robert Evans?

  They're really working on it. Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  But this is the era where there's a lot of that.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  No one's trying.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Where it's like no one's screening. So if someone's like, I want to be a serial killer. Oh, you know what I could just do? I could just go to medical school.

• 24:08Robert Evans?

  Just be a doctor.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  And be a doctor.

• 24:11Robert Evans?

  As much as I want.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Right. Using this like the.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  Or be this kind of scientist.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Front of science where it's like, it's not, it doesn't mean they can't contribute, but it does mean that it's like sadist getting an opportunity to be sadist.

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  Yes. And or in his case, perverts getting an opportunity to be a pervert. Cause that's what this is about for him. So he's talking to these white people about this hot lady. And they're like, oh, the only person with a better ass is the chief's wife, her mother. And then they say, the latter, the chief's wife, however, was slightly passe, while as the former was in full am bon poids. Right? Which I think I'm pronouncing that sort of right. It's like a French term for in good shape. Right? So they're saying that, well, her mom has a better ass, but she's getting kind of old. And so this lady's really like, she's really at the prime age. Right? Now, I'm going to continue with Galton's writing about what he does because he sees this hot woman. Right? "I professed to be a scientific man and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  measurements of her shape, but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of hottentot and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my foot rule could be of his measure, like why he's trying to measure her. And I really dared not ask my."

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Horrifying scenario.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  Right? "And I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me because it's like his wife, basically. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form. The object of my admiration stood under a tree and was turning herself about to all points of the compass as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. She couldn't like see me and she was just like walking around, but she was like turning around so I could see her ass. I could tell that. She didn't have to say it. I knew it. She knew. Right?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  She liked it.

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  "Of a sudden, my eye fell upon my sextant. The bright thought struck me and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth. And I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake. This being done, I brought, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood. And having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms." So in order, because he wants to measure this lady's ass and tits and stuff, but he can't like ask her, he uses a sextant and like his knowledge of geometry to get her measurements without her knowing.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Get real incel energy. I will say.

• 26:33Robert Evans?

  Also real meta glasses energy. This guy would have been the first in line to fucking buy meta glasses if they'd been around in his time.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh yeah. I was thinking like, oh, these is you just take a picture on the subway, I guess.

• 26:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  This is advanced.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Very advanced pervert. He is, you gotta give him that.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's a pioneer of pervert.

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  It took a lot more effort to be that kind of pervert in the Victorian era.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  It's a, it is. And also I had not realized, I had always assumed, because I've known for a long time, we've talked on the show about scientific racism and that all comes out of Galton's science. He's the father of all of that. And to realize that the origin of all of that, of all of eugenics, of all of this skull measuring is him trying, because he thinks this black lady's hot, but he can't say anything about it. So he's like secretly trying to get her measurements. That's, it's always been prurient. It's always been pornographic for these people. Up to today, the racists today are no different. You know?

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Again, I would argue, most people are perverts in some way in this world.

• 27:37Robert Evans?

  You don't have to be unethical about it.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Right? The judgment, the test of your perversion is, is how you deal with the fact that you're a pervert.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Right? Like you gotta contend with being a pervert.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The right, the ethical thing to do is find someone who either shares your perversions or is okay indulging yours consensually. Right?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  He's not, he doesn't care. None of them care about that, especially in the 1800s.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  It's just consent. Right? Pervert plus consent is generally gonna be alright.

• 28:07Robert Evans?

  It is important you understand though, that all of what comes later, all of eugenics is based in a prurient and often sexual obsessive interest in the bodies of non-white people. Right?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:17Robert Evans?

  That they have to justify because you're not supposed to. Right? Cause it's like bad to race mix. So you have to find an excuse, you know?

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  And again, he's having sex with a lot of non-white people, rape usually. I can't tell. I mean, I assume sometimes there were people who had chosen to like work in a, that said, it's the 1800s. I don't know how relevant things like consent are when we're talking about a brothel in 1840.

• 28:41Robert Evans?

  Anyway, to say Galton's writing was popular would be a massive understatement. He is in fact, one of the writers who invents the grammar of Victorian era exploration and conquest. You know? Like when we, whenever you read basically any writing justifying colonialism, it owes something to Galton. He creates the language with which we talk about colonialism. His first book was such a hit that he got to write a second in 1855. And The Art of Travel became a bestseller and in modified form, a textbook for the Royal Geographic Society. This is the book that teaches you how to run an expedition and how to meet native peoples and interact with them.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Oh, good. I'm glad he wrote a book about this.

• 29:22Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'm glad the guy who never learned any of the local languages really, and was never interested in any of the cultures he came to, wrote the book on how to like be an archaeologist slash, you know, anthropologist in this, this period of time.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Man.

• 29:35Robert Evans?

  That's good. Yeah. That's helpful. Here's ads anyway.

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• 30:08Speaker 05

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• 32:07Speaker 07

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• 32:11Speaker 04

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:14Robert Evans?

  And we're back. And by the way, we do not stand with that statement. I mean, quite frankly, I think that people from Michigan are the same as the rest of us, you know? Whatever our advertisers said about them, that's not our stance on Michiganders. So we apologize, but obviously, you know,

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Apologize to my parents immediately.

• 32:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Look, Buc-E's needs to apologize to your parents because those ads, which may have been deleted, maybe you guys didn't hear the Buc-E's ads that are really racist against Michiganders, but they've been airing them on our podcast. So

• 32:44Speaker 02

  They're funny ads.

• 32:45Robert Evans?

  Ask where they hate people from Michigan, you know? Email Buc-E's and talk to them about why they hate everyone in Michigan. I don't know why. That's not my choice, you know?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:53Robert Evans?

  That's Buc-E's. Anyway, fucking Circle K. I'll take over. Goddamn Buc-E's.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:58Robert Evans?

  Fucking Buc-E's. Um, so he's a leading man. He's a leading man in this field now and in Victorian England. So he's also just like one of the most prominent men of his day because he's rich and he is now famous, right? So he is a celebrity after this point and very influential. Galton thus gets to join in on the great debates of the day, and the great intellectual debates of his day are increasingly centered on race. As Schumacher notes in her paper, there are a number of different theories as to where human beings came from in this era, and most people are either monogenists and thus believe that all humans share a single common ancestral pair because the Bible said so. There's people who believe basically that now, but for not

• 33:41Robert Evans?

  Bible reasons, for reasons of maybe genetically, that's what happened, right? We're not, we don't 100% know, right? Um, and the upside of this belief, though, if you do believe that all human beings descend from the same ancestral pair, it makes, it can make, other people take it different directions, but it can make a powerful argument for the equality of all peoples. The Christians who are abolitionists in the early and mid 1800s, in part are abolitionists because they believe that like, we're all, like, God made us all, right? Like, you know, we're all descended from Adam and Eve. We probably should know each other, right?

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  Again, monogenists were still often very racist. They came up with different explanations for why some people are less equal than the rest. But also, there were always among the monogenists, some wide-eyed maniacs who would like read the Bible and go, well, how does this not mean we're all equal? And if you take that too far, pretty soon you got John Brown on your hands, right?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:31Robert Evans?

  Which is good, you know?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, polygenism was the other big theory, and this anticipated that the different races of the world were different species with divergent and separate histories. And people found biblical justifications for this, too, but it was much more popular among men who had discarded their faith. And Galton is in the process of discarding his faith in this period. He doesn't, he's not religious. He's not really an atheist yet, but he's not religious. That said, he hasn't discarded his prejudice. And so if you're the kind of person who doesn't really believe that much in Christianity, but you're still a bigot, you can see this as a justification for like, why people who don't look like you aren't human. Now,

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  In the modern era, I think the, by far, the most supported stance is that like all human beings share common ancestors. There is debate as to, when did we fully become like what we would call modern day humans? And is it possible that like people left Africa and evolved into Homo sapiens separately from other? There is some debate about that. I don't, and I'm not qualified to weigh in on it. Obviously, there's people on that side. I think most people who are like, well, but that doesn't mean they're less human. It just means that we took, people took different, you know? And as we come to understand more about, because there are, all of us have non-human DNA pretty much to some extent, whether it's Neanderthals or Denisovians or what they call like ghost DNA, which is

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 35:58Robert Evans?

  DNA from a similar to human, enough to interbreed, but non-human species that

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Oh, that's less

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  contributed, right?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Not as cool as what I thought it was.

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  I'm sorry.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  I, no, Robert, we all come from, didn't you know we come from lobsters?

• 36:12Robert Evans?

  We come from

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Have you heard of Jordan Peterson?

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  We do inherit much from the lobsters.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  We have, lobster serotonin is why hierarchies are good.

• 36:23Robert Evans?

  I've always said that. Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  So anyway, there's debate about this to this day that I, and I don't think that debate means that anyone's less human than the other. Also, if fucking Denisovians or like Neanderthals were around today, I would support them having rights because they were clearly intelligent sapien beings.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Right. Like, I understand a bunch of people standing around and thinking like, why, why the fuck are we all here? What are we doing here?

• 36:46Robert Evans?

  What do we hear? What do I look different? It's a thing to figure out at a point, right?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  It's a thing to figure out, and it might inform, like, learning about like basic human nature might inform some of the things about us today.

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  Medicine, right?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  But much like religion for some people, this is all going back to finding ways to justify your current behavior with these people, right? Is it like, I just want a way to justify feeling like I'm the main character in some way.

• 37:14Robert Evans?

  It's the difference between, I need to understand the genetics of these people because like sickle cell anemia is more common among folks who are inherited, you know, or who descended from this line, and we want to cure that. So we need to understand certain things about genetics in order to try to treat sickle cell anemia to being like, oh, well, because those people have this, that means they're less human than me, right?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:33Robert Evans?

  People can take kind of the same starting point, and if you're an asshole, you wind up with bigot. And if you're not an asshole, you wind up trying to solve illnesses, right?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  It's, it's why, like, I know the alpha male thing is

• 37:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  stuff of wolf prison rules or whatever.

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  But it's that same principle, right? Or it's Jordan Peterson with the lobster, where it's that I'm going to use this like pseudoscience or even real science to justify why unfair systems exist today.

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  And therefore it's natural, you know?

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. So the question is not, who was like right? Because today, we don't call this monogenist or whatever. We call it like the out of Africa hypothesis. I forget what the other one is called, but there are still, there's still debate. The debate just shouldn't be about like, who's a person?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  The answer is ultimately is like, who gives a shit, right? Like,

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  You should give a shit out, but it shouldn't change how you treat people. It's just like interesting as to like, for example, caring about like, I don't know, which ancient peoples did which genocides to whom, doesn't mean that like you support punishing people because their ancestors, the Assyrians, did this thing.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And of course, the further we get from all of that, like, not that it matters, but it's like, you know, again, the further we get from that, all that, the more people are going to have to sit around and go like, what the fuck are, why are we doing this?

• 38:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Podcast? What is this?

• 38:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  How did this all start? Who's to blame for all of this? But it like, it really shouldn't inform the way we treat anybody ever.

• 39:03Robert Evans?

  That's the problem. That's the problem. Yeah. So, uh, you've got your monogenists and you've got your polygenists, right? Um, and Galton is kind of, he's a polygenist, right? He believes that these other races are not really human beings, and that's part of, kind of involved in his like growing atheism in this period of time. Now, these are not universal views. As I said, there's a lot of debate, and there's debate about how you should treat people and how you should see these different native peoples. One of the first really popular explorers to counter the attitudes of men like Galton was David Livingstone. If you've ever heard like Professor Livingstone, I presume, right? Like the guy who like, yeah, yeah, that's David Livingstone.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  That's from.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  He was a, he was a scientist and he was a, a missionary, right? Who winds up in like the middle of fucking Africa, and he gets awarded a medal in 1856 for African exploration. Here's how Schumacher's paper describes his views. He reported being kindly treated by the natives and that they were remarkably civil and generous. Livingstone had faith in the educability and the industry of the native races. Richard Burton, also a contemporary of Galton's, held vastly different views, describing an African tribe, the Wanyika, as a feudal race of barbarians, drunken and immoral, cowardly and destructive, indolent, greedy and thriftless. So if the views on race can be thought of as a, on a continuum, then, while not an outlier, Galton's views of African natives were generally

• 40:25Robert Evans?

  at the negative end, and he had little concern about being outspoken in his writings about his beliefs. So guys like Livingstone are like, well, no, These are like people and they're, they're actually like really great. Like if you get to know them, if you like learn their language, they're pretty chill.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Right. It's the idea of like describing Native Americans as like, they're so stoic and serious and angry. And it's like, no, they're angry at you.

• 40:45Robert Evans?

  They're pissed at you. You fucked some shit up for them, man.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Right. Like you're describing how they felt about you as if it's what makes up their people. It turns out if you're not a dickhead, they might actually be quite nice to you.

• 40:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It'd be, it'd be like if I came back from Iraq and was like, there's something in Iraqi culture that makes them really like bottled water. And it's like, no, just because of a wide variety of political things, the water's not fucking trustworthy. Like a lot of the time in war strewn areas, so they need to use bottled water. Like they don't prefer it. It's just that the only option they have, but you're not like, people like him aren't thinking about shit that way. Francis, people like Livingston are though. So again, you should condemn Galton and, and Burton and the like for not thinking of shit like this. Cause guys like Livingston are perfectly capable of it. Right? This is a choice people are making to be bigots. Francis returned home to England in time to spend the Christmas of 1852 with his mother and sister. He met a girl during this visit, Louisa Butler, and the two were engaged to marry by April of 1853.

• 41:43Robert Evans?

  They traveled some and rented a few places while he kept writing books and doing his research on the increasing obsession of his life, race. In 1857, he purchased a home in South Kensington and would spend the rest of his life there, working as a scientist. He transitioned then from the life of an active explorer to that of a rich man, sitting at a high level at the RGS, helping to plan out expeditions, and then critiquing the failures and successes of the men who actually went out to explore. He wrote one to one younger explorer after, so there's this debate over the origins of the Nile. And there's this, this legendary explorer, John Hannings Speck, who turns out to be right about where the Nile is. But he winds up in a disagreement with everyone else in the RGS, including, well, a lot of other people in the RGS, including Galton.

• 42:28Robert Evans?

  And Galton, eventually this guy Speck dies, right? He accidentally shoots himself while he's doing one of these hunting trips that these guys are always doing.

• 42:37Robert Evans?

  And afterwards, Galton writes like a friend of this dude who is dead. What he could have done and what you can do is to state accurately what you saw, leaving the stay at home minute science to coalesce the data. In other words, like, well, where Speck went wrong is he tried to have ideas of his own. You should leave that to the smart, rich guys who don't go out and explore anymore. Like leave the smart stuff to us. Don't think about things. Just report, you know? He didn't treat, act that way when he was in the field, but that's what he wants other people to do. Right? And so Galton's life went on periodically. He took the time to publish articles with his growing theories on race. In the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species by his older cousin, Charles Darwin electrified and inspired him.

• 43:20Robert Evans?

  And this is what seems to have made him into fully an atheist. Right? He reads this book by Darwin and he was like, okay, that explains it. There's no God. And like a lot of people have that attitude, right? To be fair. Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I have killed God.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Darwin got him. Fucking spirit his ass. Darwin had opened his book by discussing the breeding of livestock for specific traits, because that's relevant when you're talking about natural selection. Galton was struck with an idea though, when he read that portion, an idea that hadn't occurred to Darwin, which is like, what if we do that to people? Right?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  Well, if we could do that to livestock, why can't we breed people to have more traits that we want? Right? What's wrong with that?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not a dark, this is like a dark.

• 44:03Robert Evans?

  Is it gonna go anywhere bad?

• 44:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He publishes his first writing on what would come to be called eugenics in 1865. This two-part article, published in McMillan's magazine, was titled Hereditary Talent and Character, and it introduced practical elements of early race science to the educated public. He writes, quote, "The power of man over animal life and producing whatever varieties of form he pleases is enormously great. It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder's will. It is my desire to show, more pointedly then, so far as I am aware, has been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control." Now, I'll point something out here, which is that there actually already was going on in this period of time, an experiment into what if you breed people together?

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  Who have only the best traits, as far as what we rich Europeans consider the best traits. What if you only let those people breed with each other? And what happens is you get the Habsburg monarchy, like the, like the Habsburg family, who are horribly interbred to the point that like, you've got people on the throne, not far from this period, who are like unable to like function because they're horribly inbred. Right?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:14Robert Evans?

  Like it's not good.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  It's the thing like these, they're not, people aren't fucking Pokemon. You can't like, I don't know.

• 45:22Robert Evans?

  It's not how intelligence works. He doesn't understand recessive traits. So he thinks if you've got a smart man, it'll make another smart kid. Right?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. The problem is.

• 45:31Robert Evans?

  He doesn't understand.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a lot of problems, but there's one of the problems is like, what is a better person? Is an impossible question. And the idea of like, someone's decision of what makes a better person is all wrapped up in culture and prejudice.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  And how they're raised.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  All sorts of terrible things and not understanding what it means. And like, you know, capitalism and the system in place and like how a person functions within that, none of that means anything.

• 46:02Robert Evans?

  No.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Ultimately.

• 46:04Robert Evans?

  If you, if you let the people who have like the most influence over like what gets written and what rich people think is credible, determine who gets to breed based on the characteristics they most value, you'll get a bunch of people, you'll get a country full of nothing but people with sub stacks. Right?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:19Robert Evans?

  And you won't have anyone who knows how to like make or do anything, because these people don't know how to make or do anything. Right?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:25Robert Evans?

  Galton never did anything really on his own. Like.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  It's, it's, no, it's just why diversity is actually strength. That's not just a saying is that like, no, the more, yeah. The, the more diverse group of people you have, putting their heads together and putting their cultures together and putting their experiences together, means that they're better equipped for anything that might happen.

• 46:48Robert Evans?

  It's why, for example, if you look at like the mathematicians who are going to come about like a hundred years after this, like Albert Einstein, not a guy who was bred, a guy who came from what he would have considered, what Galton would consider inferior gene stock. Right? And when I said Galton never did anything, yeah, he does have a lot, he makes a lot of advancements in statistics and like math. Because he's a rich guy, everyone listens to. He's not the only guy who could have thought of those things. He was just the guy that wasn't starving to death with that kind of a mind, because he was born rich. Right?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  That's what I mean. Like, I don't have that much respect for even the good things he did, because it was all on fucking easy mode. Because he was born rich and in charge of the British fucking empire. Right? So the core of this piece that Galton has put together, this 1865 article, that's like a precursor. He hasn't invented the term genetics yet, or eugenics yet, but he's starting to think about it. And the core of his argument was that men of good breeding, right? Like he, he kind of collects a bunch of stories of men of good breeding to see how many times these like men who are like significant, have kids who go on to be also significant. Right? So he's trying to prove that great men are likelier to have children who are great men, sons.

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  He's not really concerned with the daughters, but great men are more likely to have sons who are eminent men. And that's proof that they have better genes, you know?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  What is great? It's, it's that idea.

• 48:12Robert Evans?

  Yes. We're gonna talk about all this day.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  It's like if someone's like a successful lawyer, right? And it's like, well, he must be a great man. And it's like, no, he's just good at the fake rules.

• 48:22Robert Evans?

  Making money in this way. Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  About this thing. And he happens to have a lot of money and he can afford nice things.

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  A big part of Galton's calculus is going to be like, wow, a lot of great lawyers have sons who are great lawyers. It must be because genetically they're more inclined to be great lawyers. And it's like, is it that or his dad owned a law firm? So he got a really huge leg up. Right? It would be like being like, wow, there's something in the Quaid genetics that makes for great actors. And that's why Jack Quaid has been a, it's like, no, as Jack Quaid would say, he had a real leg up, right? He's a great, good actor. I like Jack Quaid, but like, he's Meg Ryan's son. His last name's Quaid. It helped.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  The irony here and like, it's the thing, if, listen, if you're rich, that doesn't mean you're a useless piece of shit necessarily. However, this line of thinking creates a situation, right? Where like, you're actually doing the opposite. And by like encouraging like, oh, these rich people need to have tons of kids because they're better stock. It's like, if anything, you're putting in more people who are, don't have to like learn or fight their whole lives, who live, they're actually doing the opposite by this line of thinking.

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  Jerar Tolkien, who writes The Lord of the Rings and is like, fucking has to fight in World War One. He's not a guy who gets like, being a great author handed to him on a platter. Versus Christopher Paolini, the arrogant kid, whose parents own like a publishing house. And so like, when he's a kid, and he's probably not really ready, he gets like a book published and they're able to like really push it to be very popular. It's just less impressive than what Tolkien did, because it was handed to this kid.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  All right. And again, it doesn't mean that someone can't be talented. It just, it actually worsens their odds. It's like when it, it's like, it's like later directors where it's like, no one's pushing back on the directors. So they can make whatever they want.

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  We're as impressed by fucking Spielberg anymore, you know?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Right. Why does Megalopolis exist? Probably because no one was like Coppola, no, you can't do this.

• 50:23Robert Evans?

  Man, it's because you hit a certain point of wealth and fame in which you have no more adversity. And like art comes from adversity and so do, so does like achievement as a rule. It's just less impressive when there's no friction. Right?

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  And there's never any friction in Galton's life. And he is, as he's trying to prove that like. Good breeding is what really matters and what makes people great or not. He's just looking at other rich people who have lived frictionless existence and like, well, look at how many of their sons wound up rich and famous, too. And that's, that's really like most of what's going on with his actual like science in this book. And it shouldn't be surprising that the inventor of eugenics was a rich kid who inherited his fortune and that he concluded that great men tend to have great children. Um, he came to understand as a result of this research that breeding or nature was the main and most dominant factor in deciding men's mental capability. It's almost the only thing that matters.

• 51:19Robert Evans?

  And therefore it makes sense for the state to lavish resources in breeding support, not on the poor who are struggling, but on the rich and the already successful in order to ensure that they have more kids, because that's what'll make society better in the long run. Galton expressed fear that financial constraints and the desire to have a career often kept men of genius celibate during their prime breeding years. Right? They're too busy trying to establish themselves as a, in a career and they don't have as many kids as they otherwise would. And so he suggests that society should take a role in encouraging and funding breeding between exceptional people. What an extraordinary effect might be produced on our race if its object was to unite in marriage those who possess the finest and most suitable natures, mental, moral and physical.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  At one point, he tried to calculate the frequency that men of ability are born in the general population and he concluded only one in 3,000 people were naturally exceptional, which means that if you've got three or four exceptional men in the same family in just a couple of generations, that's proof that they're thousands of times genetically superior than the common man. Right? Completely ignoring wealth, completely ignoring influence, nepotism, all of that stuff.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Right?

• 52:32Robert Evans?

  Um, he calculated this and, and the way he gets this number that one in 3,000 people are exceptional is also complete bullshit because he calculates this by using the number of college students educated in Europe over the last 400 years and comparing that to estimates of the general population. Right? Cause only, all of the exceptional people naturally made it to college. There's no exceptional people who didn't get to go to college in 400 years.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Again, it's just like self fulfilling. It's, you know, it's an echo chamber.

• 52:59Robert Evans?

  It's just dipshit math. It's dipshit math. Yeah. It's fucking A. In the second part of that article, he suggested selective breeding for positive qualities in some groups and discouraged breeding entirely for other groups. And these other groups are nearly all non-white people that he had zero experience with. He never meets any of these people. He doesn't know them. He doesn't even talk to most of them. As Susan Schumacher writes, unlike his work with European populations, he makes no attempt to provide any evidence for his comments. He expounds at length about the American Indian, a race he has not interacted with personally, and he makes no effort to indicate the source of his information. He maintains, however, that they are cold, melancholic, patient and taciturn, but also

• 53:41Robert Evans?

  patriotic, have strong local attachments and a sense of personal dignity. As Michael Billen comments, the prejudices of the, of the Victorian explorer were raised to the level of immutable biological facts. Right? Like, and this is, he's not even seeing these people. He just heard a description of them and like, ah, the red man, cold and melancholic. And he's like, yeah, that's their characteristics. This has to be everything you need to know about them. Can't be anything else to learn. Right?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  It's this guy removed from people that he's standing in front of often, often now like removing himself even more from people and trying to make people these equations in his head. And it is, it's one of those things where it's like, the idea that any of this thinking would be passed on in an educational setting is not good.

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  It is upsetting. His scientific method is of course flawed across the board, but while he received some criticism at the time, it was usually less dire than modern scientist Ruth Schwartz Cohen's conclusion that, quote, rarely in history, in the history of science, has such an important generalization been made on the basis of so little concrete evidence? So badly put and so naively conceived. I do like, that's her discussing his, his work here, this 1865 article and a lot of his other stuff is that like, yeah, this is about the most ignorant bullshit that's ever been put, turned into science.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  It's baby shit.

• 55:04Robert Evans?

  Yep. Now, one thing, positive thing you can say about Galton in this era is that he was not as bad as he would come to be because he doesn't yet think that interracial marriage should be banned categorically. And in general, he muted his real opinions on race for a while out of fear of public backlash. As he later acknowledged in his autobiography, popular feeling was not then ripe to accept even the elementary truths of hereditary talent and character upon which the possibility of race improvement depends. Still less was it prepared to consider dispassionately any proposals for practical action. So I laid the subject wholly to one side for many years. Right? I hid my power levels that people wouldn't know I was a fucking proto-Nazi for a little while.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  I can't believe you're like, he's not as bad as he will be. And it's like, he's already murdered several monkeys.

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  He's killed monkeys. He's a sex criminal. Great.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's a sex criminal. He, he, he made a person his pet.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He sure did. In 1869, he published a book, Hereditary Genius, that took his initial list of successful men and their offspring and expanded it to collect data on many different kinds of successful people. This reinforced his belief that some people are inherently special. And he wrote that if the eminent men of any period had been changelings when babies, a fair proportion of those who survived and retained their health would have equally risen to prominence. You'll see this today, this attitude like, well, if you were to take any billionaire and like, start them with nothing again at the bottom of society, they'd wind up being rich and powerful again because they're just inherently better. Right?

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I assume you saw the, yeah. You said, no, you saw the interview of Elon Musk being asked like, if you had to start over with a thousand dollars and he couldn't even understand the question.

• 56:45Robert Evans?

  No, no. He has no, he can't conceive of it.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was like, well, I wouldn't have that. And it's like, yes, you idiot. We're trying to.

• 56:52Robert Evans?

  Fucking dipshit. Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And this, these are comforting things to believe that like, oh, even if I was made to live as a poor person, I'd wind up successful again because I'm so inherently good. That's comforting if you're one of the most eminent men in your era. Right?

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Right. Because I, I get it is like, if you become stupid rich, you gotta tell yourself like, ah, it's because I'm so cool.

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  I deserve it. Right? And he went on to argue in his book, in this book, that just as men like him were superior to others in their society, his race, the white race existed on top of a pyramidal hierarchy. And on, and he wouldn't have said the white race, right? He would have said Anglo-Saxons because he doesn't believe, for example, like people in the Balkans, maybe even Italians aren't really white to him. Right?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. This is advanced racism.

• 57:37Robert Evans?

  This is advanced racism. Right? But as people like him, as he is at the top of his own cultural hierarchy, people, his race is at the top of the global hierarchy of races. And at the bottom, of course, are black people and lowest of all, native Australians.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Again, it's very funny for a guy to be like, hey, everybody, I did the science. I did, I spent a lot of time on the science. I determined that I'm the best of all of you.

• 58:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. His arguments here are filled with flawed and faulty logic because, quote, no man, and this is how he argues, that like, people who are at the top now would always have been at the top. Quote, no man can achieve a very high reputation without being gifted in very, with very high abilities. And thus few who possess these very capabilities can fail. Right? Because anyone who succeeds must have be talented, anyone who's talented will always be a success. Right? Now, he does make occasional allowances to the fact that being born especially rich to powerful parents might tip the scales a little, but these are never more than cursory gestures and his actual research is universally dogshit. His favored kind of eminent man, when he's talking about like men of eminence, the top

• 58:47Robert Evans?

  kind is a judge because no mediocre man could ever become a judge. Right? It's impossible for men who aren't impressive to be judges. Only judges, all judges are good. Um, A.J.A. So he'd saw the fact that many prominent families had multiple eminent members as proof of their inherent genetic superiority. Per Bowyer, his biographer, he rejected the view that this was due to their having more opportunities of thrusting their relatives into eminence. He also stepped in to explain points where the facts deviated from his beliefs. Great military commanders, he found, rarely had sons who were equally successful. Now, this might be because you, that's not really a heritable, it's based on like your experiences and like what you're, how you grow up and right?

• 59:31Robert Evans?

  Like if you, if you become an emperor, your kid probably doesn't have to fight his whole life to build an empire and she's just not going to be as good at it as you, right? Probably. You get some exceptions like Alexander, right? But usually most great military leaders in history are not the sons of equally great military leaders. It actually happens fairly rarely. And he blames this on the fact that if married at all, they are mostly away from their wives on military service. Now, first off, this ignores all the rapes that these guys commit as they conquer cities around the world, but also even in this period of time, I'm reading a book right now called Incomparable, which is about like Napoleon Bonaparte's, the most elite, like regiment in his entire army, the ninth infantry. And like, there's tons of stories about guys who've been in the French army for like decades and have like kids and stuff.

• 1:00:16Robert Evans?

  Right? It's actually like really common, even if you're constantly on deployment to have kids and just be away. Right? That's actually certainly more normal for like officers and stuff than not. Women, though, he felt clearly had some direct impact on their sons, but he, he was never able to give them as much credit as the men. Men, women had to be less responsible. That's so crazy to hear. That's a real idea, bro. Oh, man, the racist guy also hates women. Oh, man. Also doesn't like women. Wow, that's so crazy. It's just that whenever he has an eminent man who's like, sons don't do anything cool. He's like, well, their mom must have watered them. Oh, yeah. His great man genetics.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  It's also so scientific to be like, surely the women had something to do.

• 1:00:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Like so incurious.

• 1:01:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Galton, as far as I can tell, is the first man, I'm sure, I mean, this belief exists, but he's the first man to try to argue scientifically that women are less suited for science and math than men. And he does this by citing the fact that great scientists credited their fathers in their biographies three times as often as they credited their mothers. So obviously, science genes can't be passed on by women. Right?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Wow, what a guy.

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  Were their moms allowed to be sighted? Were they allowed to read? Like.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  He said, fuck women.

• 1:01:33Robert Evans?

  He said, the great scientist who credits it all? The great scientist who credits his early education to his sister? Hmm. Did she really have nothing to do with your inquiring mind, Francis? Like, I don't know, man.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Well, this is the thing about him is like, this whole thing is about a guy who you've already brought me through the history of him being like the biggest jackass of his time.

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  Just the shittiest dick who ever sucked.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this perfect storm of mediocre and like evil.

• 1:02:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  And then him growing up to be like, I think some people are naturally better than others. I'm naturally better. And it's like, your life is proof that that's not true.

• 1:02:12Robert Evans?

  You in fact are not.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:15Robert Evans?

  Now, Darwin sent a letter congratulating his cousin on the book, Hereditary Genius. Galton responded to his cousin with fawning praise, saying, I used to be wretched under the weight of the old fashioned arguments from design, of which I felt, though I was unable to prove myself, the worthlessness, right? He's saying like, I used to believe in like God had made all, and you freed me from that, Darwin. So I'm just so glad that you, you find something valuable in my arguments that like, were better than everybody else. You know who else is better than everybody else?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Dave Bell. Me.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Dave and the advertisers of this podcast, who might be Dave? I don't know. It seems unlikely, though. It does seem unlikely.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

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• 1:03:24Speaker 05

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• 1:03:45Speaker 03

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• 1:03:51Speaker 05

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• 1:04:07Speaker 00

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• 1:04:23Speaker 05

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• 1:05:28Speaker 04

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• 1:05:32Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Galton's book became influential across a broad swath of an English intellectual life. Darwin pronounced that the book had convinced him that education and environment could have only a small effect on the mind of anyone, as most of our qualities are innate. Galton had his critics, though, particularly in the religious press. One of his more scientifically minded reviewers, Herman Marivale, published a cogent critique of some of his methodology, as Bolwerd describes. To illustrate his argument, Marivale pointed out that of the 250 clever relations of judges in Galton's list, more than 100 had been lawyers themselves, which seems strange unless we are to assume not only that talent is hereditary, but that the special breed of the lawyer is hereditary also.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:06:18Robert Evans?

  He drew attention to the family of Atkins in Galton's list of judges. There have been four judges of the name, and let us note in passing, nobody, except a law student or a painstaking county antiquary, has ever heard more than the name of any of them. These Atkinses are credited with seven or eight remarkable relatives, but of these, there is only one who was not a lawyer, and he was a reader of Lincoln's End. This whole list has the unmistakable character of a snug little family of jobbers, rather than a galaxy of genius. In other words, no one's heard of these judges, no one's heard of these lawyers, there's no evidence they're good at what they were doing, there's just evidence that because some of them were lawyers, they made others lawyers. It's nepotism. There's just evidence of nepotism. That's jobbers.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  It's lawyers. It's we invented our own little language, and now we are the best at interpreting.

• 1:07:04Robert Evans?

  Now, we're the smartest. We're the smartest. Yeah, yeah. The intellect, this intellectual monument to self-congratulation is the foundation of eugenics science. This is what it's all based on, baby. Galton expanded on his established habit of throwing as many numbers at the reader as he could gather. This is a big part of even today, like the modern race science. Whoa, look at this statistic about IQ. Does IQ really tell you that much? Are the IQ tests good and consistent? Where are you getting your, anyway, it doesn't matter. Throw as many numbers at them, so they think you're smart.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Ben Shapiro's sentence takes a paragraph to break up.

• 1:07:39Robert Evans?

  Honestly, yes. You have to hit some people, and Galton should have been hit more. Anyway, before this had been a, before this had been a mix of, like, before this book, his, the numbers he threw out, because statistics wasn't really all that figured out, they'd been a mix of his own primitive attempts at statistical analysis and measurements of people's bodies. But between 1865 and the publication of Hereditary Genius in 1869, Galton learned about Gossian law and started applying modern statistical analysis to his findings, often badly, but someone else invents, like, figures out and starts writing about this way of doing statistics better, and that's what Galton is starting to add to his science in 1869.

• 1:08:21Robert Evans?

  For example, he read about a demonstration by another scientist that showed that height, weight, and other measurements for a population fell in a bell shaped distribution. He extrapolated from these results and observations about grades at Cambridge, and he developed an A to G classification of all men on earth, according to their natural gifts. Naturally, only white men were capable of reaching the highest categories, like F, and those were, no black people reached that.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:08:48Robert Evans?

  There's no black people who are that level, right? That just doesn't happen. This is, yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Science, it's science.

• 1:08:53Robert Evans?

  It's just science that I invented and figured out.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  This is cocaine science, but, right?

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is cocaine science, yeah.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Yes, this is meth science.

• 1:09:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. As Schumacher writes, as with clear, previous articles, these assessments appear to be based solely on his own experiences in Southern Africa, and he makes no attempt to produce a scientific or statistical explanations for his comments. One representative example of his logic would be his belief that the least impressive white travelers would automatically hold their own and mentally outfox any African chief, even in his home, and this is based solely on the fact that Galton was pretty sure he'd once outsmarted an African chief, right? So any white guy could do it, right?

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's just turning his, like, random inklings into science. He's like, I think I could take that guy, therefore it's in the textbook now.

• 1:09:40Robert Evans?

  Did he outsmart this guy by making him sign a shitty treaty? Or did the guy just know, like, well, this guy's the representative of people with more guns than me?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  This is, it's cult thinking, right? Like, this is, if I started a cult, a lot of the stuff I'd write down would just be shit that I think.

• 1:09:56Robert Evans?

  That I believe already.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, about, like, oh, I think my neighbor's a murderer. Okay, that's a new commandment. Like, that's just, yeah.

• 1:10:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if I was doing my version of this scientist based on my own success, I'd be like, well, look, obviously, if you want to be a success as a writer, you've got to lick heroin off of a guy's fingers and rush his stuff, right? Like, it's the only way, as far as I'm aware, based on my sample group of one, right?

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It worked for you, therefore it works for everybody. They should teach it in, like, fifth grade English class.

• 1:10:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The book Hereditary Genius was a hit, but it did inspire, as I've stated, more than a few detractors. Galton responded to some of the most prominent criticisms of Hereditary Genius, specifically the idea embodied in a review published by the Times of London, that universal knowledge of reading, writing, and ciphering and the absence of popperism would raise the national grade or ability far greater than any, and higher than any system of selected marriage, right? So the, again, the Times of London is like, look, if we just educate kids and make sure that they're not, like, starving, that will do more than making rich people, easier for rich people to breed, which is objectively true. And I have to note here that as I wrote this part of the episode, I was listening to music, and the song "Flagpole Situp" by Harvey Danger shuffled on, and as I typed

• 1:11:11Robert Evans?

  the word "selected marriage," I heard these lyrics that in retrospect describe Francis Galton's intellectual journey in thousands fewer words than I've used. Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding, the cretins cloning and feeding, and I don't even own a TV, right? That's gotten, that's gotten, baby. Yeah, that's what he believes about the world.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I have to also note, Hereditary Genius.

• 1:11:39Robert Evans?

  Terrible title.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Like, that is, it's a, it's a, it's a manifesto title, or it's like a...

• 1:11:45Robert Evans?

  It is, it is. This is the title of a kid who goes up and shoots up a fucking school. Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  That or like a Pixies album.

• 1:11:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or a Pixies album.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, it's, man, what, like, the moment someone hands you a book that says, I wrote this, it's called Hereditary Genius. You don't read that. You burn, you burn that.

• 1:12:03Robert Evans?

  You might burn it, yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  You might. You throw it right in the fireplace.

• 1:12:07Robert Evans?

  Yep. In 1873, Galton wrote an article for Frasier's magazine that the website Science AQ summarized as describing, "A future in which the genetic elite were incentivized by the state to procreate, while the genetically unfit would be barred from reproducing at all." In a contemporary letter to the Times of London, Galton suggested giving Africa to the Chinese, theorizing immense gain if Chinese people could outbreed and finally displace Africans, which is at least a unique kind of racial, ethnic cleansing. I haven't heard that specific idea before.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Wait, what did he say?

• 1:12:41Robert Evans?

  He wants to replace Africans with Chinese people in Africa, because it'll, because they're more industrious. Right.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Such a weirdly specific racism.

• 1:12:50Robert Evans?

  About the Chinese too.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it really is. That year, Galton also first started to speculate about the categories his fellow Britons might fit into, analyzing and describing them with the same tools he developed to categorize native races. He disliked what he found. Too many sickly children were born to narrow-chested men and fragile, delicate women. Galton first came up with the infamous term-

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  Narrow-chested men. I like that.

• 1:13:14Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Skinny fucks. Too many soy boys having babies. Galton first came up with the infamous term eugenics in the early 1880s. We don't know exactly when, but it's first published when he's working on a book called "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development." As Angela Siney writes in the book Superior, "Galton coined the term in 1883 from the Greek prefix you for well or good to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations." Schumacher gives a somewhat differing account of the origins of the word eugenics in her paper. She says, "He adapted the Greek word eugeneis, which translated to mean 'good in stock and hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.'"

• 1:13:57Robert Evans?

  Meanwhile, Anne Hanley, a lecturer in history of science and medicine and director of the MA program for medical humanities at Birkbeck, the University of London, gives a third explanation. He coined the term eugenics from the Greek meaning "well-born" to determine, to describe the betterment of the race through scientific interventions and social controls. So, there's a little bit of disagreement, you know, on the specifics here, but what everyone agrees is that he coins this term to define the bettering of the race through scientific and social interventions, right? Hanley notes that one of his direct inspirations was his cousin Darwin's documentation of breeding pigeons for specific characteristics. She adds, "To facilitate his studies of human difference, Galton created the Anthropometric

• 1:14:40Robert Evans?

  Laboratory, the archives of which are held in the University College London. He collected enormous quantities of data to prove that humans were subject to Darwinian natural selection in the same way as plants and animals." Indeed, according to Galton and his followers, including Carl Pearson, who became the first chair of eugenics at University College London, the British race was degenerating, right? As he starts to turn these techniques, he's initially developed to analyze these people he's either seen or read about, and he turns them on to his own people, he starts to realize, oh my God, these poor people are out breeding the rich people, and that means the British race is going to get weak. It's the, it's the idiocracy argument, right?

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In the 1870s, he had formalized the often perverted inclination, he felt, to measure the anatomies of people to determine their abilities and fitness for breeding, and his findings, he argued, proved that the streets of London were being flooded with subpar people, particularly Irish famine refugees who, having survived near extinction, took on what he described as a Negroid look, right? Wow, once these people starve to death, they look like the other starving people I've seen. That must mean that they're all genetically inferior, as opposed to again, no-

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  Malnourished because they haven't had enough food.

• 1:15:51Robert Evans?

  They're all malnourished because of people like you. Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Such a simple guy.

• 1:15:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's such a simple guy, right? And he, he starts, he's not, he wasn't just worried that these people are going to outbreed higher quality men and women, he's scared that they're going to destroy society. His work measuring human bodies led him to be the first scientist to discover and elucidate the principle of statistic correlation, and he'd noticed that the people who seemed to be breeding the most, the poor, also did the most gambling and committing, fighting, and they didn't actually. It was incredibly common at the point of time that he was alive for like rich children of rich families to waste their entire fortune gambling. That's increased, that's how like all of the rich families of his era are going to lose their money. It's like their sons gambling it away, right?

• 1:16:39Robert Evans?

  But he's like, he just sees the poor people gambling. It's different from rich people gambling, right?

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:44Robert Evans?

  It's worse, and that's probably heritable, so we should probably do something about that, maybe by stopping certain people from breeding, right? That's where Galton's gonna land, and we'll talk more about that in part three, but we're done for now, Dave. How are you feeling?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  I feel invigorated.

• 1:16:59Robert Evans?

  Good.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  You know, by all this talk of, of just a terrible eugenicist.

• 1:17:04Robert Evans?

  Just an awful man, an awful man.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  I wanna, I'm gonna build a cage and I'm gonna find his bones. I'm gonna dig him up. I'm gonna dig him up. I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna dig, I'm gonna dig him up.

• 1:17:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, dig him up, and look, folks, go out and find some bones of your own, find someone else's bones, somebody you think is bad, and dig them up. That's probably legal.

• 1:17:23Speaker 05

  I just wanna know, are you guys both narrow-chested men? What's happening here? Cause I'm an uncommonly good-looking female lunatic, and I just wanna know, are you narrow-chested men?

• 1:17:35Robert Evans?

  I don't, I, I, there's only one way to find out, Sophie, and that's we've gotta dig up as many bones as we can.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:41Robert Evans?

  And we gotta measure the shit out of them.

• 1:17:43Speaker 05

  Gotta measure the bones.

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  Get your sextance out and start measuring, motherfuckers, you know?

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  We got a plan.

• 1:17:50Robert Evans?

  We got a plan. Okay, everybody.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 1:17:53Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

• 1:18:26Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

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  I saw him violent. Backhanded her, pow! Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

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  In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him, but now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case.

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