Francis Galton (Radio Edit)

Greg Jenner is joined in Victorian England by historian and curator Subhadra Das and comedian Desiree Burch to learn all about the life of scientist and eugenics pioneer Francis Galton. He was many things: a Victorian gentleman scientist, an inventor of whacky devices, a pioneer of fingerprinting technology, the less famous cousin of superstar naturalist Charles Darwin, and an important figure in the development of statistics. But more importantly – and more troublingly – Francis Galton originated the now discredited science of eugenics. His theories about how to apply principles of good breeding to humans, and his advocacy of ways to improve Britain’s so-called ‘racial health’, led directly and indirectly to many horrors in the decades after his death, from the forced sterilisation of certain groups to the Holocaust. This episode traces his life from child prodigy to prolific scientist, exploring his obsession with understanding the world through measurement and statistics, and how this mindset eventually led him to pioneer eugenic theories. Along the way it takes in his African travels, unwise self-experimentation during his medical degree, and his troubling views on women. This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Naomi Weaver Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

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

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

  This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready to cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 0:33Greg Jenner?

  Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is the AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task, like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and

• 1:18Greg Jenner?

  Slack. And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.

• 1:48Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me. We are the BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name's Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster. And today, we are growing out our sideburns, gathering some problematic data, as we head back to Victorian Britain to learn all about the scientist Francis Galton. And to help us in our study, I have two very special lab partners. In history corner, she's a historian, writer, and curator, and a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the scientific racism and eugenics movement. Sorry about that. You might have read her excellent book, Uncivilized: Ten Lies That Made the West. And luckily for us, she spent nine years as the curator of the science collection at University College

• 2:32Greg Jenner?

  London, where a lot of the Galton material is held. It's Subhadra Dass. Welcome, Subhadra.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Hello. Lovely to be here.

• 2:38Greg Jenner?

  Thank you for coming in. And in comedy corner, she needs no introduction, but I contractually have to do one. She's a comedian, an actor, a writer. You've seen her on all the telly, on Taskmaster, Frankie Ball's New World Order, QI, Too Hot to Handle. Maybe you've seen her live on tour, a brilliant stand-up comedian. But of course, most importantly, you'll know her from so many of our episodes. Timekeeping, History Broadway musicals, Lena Horne. We had to have her back for series 12. It's Desiree Birch.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  How did we not get sideburns for this? It's a visual medium now. Surely we should have all been doing this.

• 3:10Greg Jenner?

  Desiree, I mean, you've been on the show loads of times. I think we've skirted around the edge of eugenics sometimes. But what do you know about Francis Galton?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  So I actually, in a show that I did, one of my tour shows, Desiree's Coming Early, we talked about Francis Galton because he sort of pioneered the eugenics that went into this sort of IQ test. Because I talked a lot about that and having grown up and sort of like gifted and talented education in California, and how that was sort of predicated on an IQ test that both like limited the opportunities for a lot of black people in California at certain periods, but also allowed me to get into the kind of education that would get me into higher and higher places. So, and also apparently was the only reason we figured out that lead was making people like dumber in America, because there

• 4:00Speaker 03

  was lead in all the gas and everything. And it was only the IQ test that was like, oh, lead go up, IQ go down. And like, then they got rid of lead and everybody was like, oh, finally I can like remember anything or function. So that was like the one good thing, apparently.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that might be the only good thing about IQ.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  The only good thing. But yeah, it did like, you know, whatever Europe did with eugenics, America was like, all right. And they just like blew it up to 10,000 and it was perfectly horrible.

• 4:25Greg Jenner?

  That's a pretty good summary.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Except for the lead bit. Except for the lead.

• 4:28Greg Jenner?

  Except for the lead bit. I mean, there's actually a lot more to talk about. Galton's life is sort of fascinating and deeply problematic, but there will be some funny bits, hopefully. You know, we are a comedy show.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  There always is.

• 4:39Greg Jenner?

  But we are going to be crashing into eugenics at some point. So let's, you know, so klaxon warning there. But so let's crack on. So what do you know?

• 4:52Greg Jenner?

  This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's not so lovely subject. Francis Galton, Sir Francis Galton, is sometimes called the most influential British scientist you've never heard of. If you've heard of him, like Desiree, you might know he was the originator of the science or pseudoscience of eugenics, the belief that society can be improved.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  So he's like the dark money of like, so you know, it's like you've never heard of him, but his work is in everything.

• 5:21Greg Jenner?

  Exactly. So, so you know, eugenics is the idea that you can improve the human race by selecting who can and cannot reproduce. You may know him as a major figure in early criminology. If you know your Charles Darwin's, you may know that he was Darwin's famous cousin. But were Galton's actual inventions and discoveries, are they, you know, important to the history of science? Why did he take Darwin's ideas to such a dark place?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Because he was the cousin who wasn't as cool as Darwin. And Darwin came up, he's like, oh, well, I could do that. And I could do like 10 times more and made it way worse.

• 5:55Greg Jenner?

  And most importantly of all.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  It's like he's in the room.

• 5:58Greg Jenner?

  Final question. When do a pair of gloves deserve to be cancelled? So Subhadra, he's born in 1822, which makes him a kind of Regency era. He's going to crash into Victorian era later. Where is he born in the country? And, you know, does the family have money? Is he posh?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  They are new money. The Galtons made their money three generations earlier. So Samuel Galton makes his money as an ironmonger.

• 6:21Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Which sounds fairly innocuous.

• 6:23Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it does.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Until you start to remember that ironmongery means making things like chains and shackles and muzzles.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Ka-ching. He's one of the gajillions cashing in on human trafficking.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Totally directly making money from the slave trade. But they're clever as well. So they pivot because they know that the trade in enslaved Africans is going to be made illegal. They swap to a different technology.

• 6:49Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  In terms to be able to benefit from this indirectly.

• 6:52Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  They swapped to gun manufacturing.

• 6:55Greg Jenner?

  Great.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Because that way.

• 6:56Greg Jenner?

  The ethical choice.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And they're Quakers as well. So this is kind of like an interesting thing. By the time we get to our Galton, they've converted to Anglicanism. But the family starts out as a Quaker family. So yeah.

• 7:07Greg Jenner?

  And then they move to the much cleaner industry of banking, which.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Which, I mean, it's like, let's put them all together.

• 7:15Greg Jenner?

  I mean, as a trio, it's a fairly evil selection, isn't it?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  It is the full trifecta of douchery, yeah, entirely. So now that when they're in banking, of course, they're making money indirectly from the trade that they made money from directly.

• 7:27Greg Jenner?

  Okay, fine. Okay. So that was the first Samuel Galton. And the Samuel Galton who is the father of our little Francis Galton.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:34Greg Jenner?

  Is the third Samuel Galton.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  He is. He's Samuel Tertius Galton.

• 7:36Greg Jenner?

  Tertius.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what I wondered. Because I was like, Tertius, like tertiary, the third. They didn't want to call him Tripp.

• 7:43Greg Jenner?

  They didn't call him Tripp. That's it. Yeah. Tripp Galton.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  All the lax pros.

• 7:49Greg Jenner?

  Okay. So tell us about the family connection, because little Francis Galton is connected to the Darwins.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  He is.

• 7:56Greg Jenner?

  So how does that work on a family tree?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  So he was the son of Samuel Tertius Galton, and also of Violetta Darwin, who was the daughter of a famous doctor called Erasmus Darwin. And this is how we get that Charles Darwin connection, is because they share that grandfather.

• 8:09Greg Jenner?

  And he's a brilliant mind as a kid, right? So at one, he's reading?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Not quite. Eighteen months, he knows the alphabet.

• 8:16Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Age two, he can read. Age three, he can write. And age five, he's on to epic poetry.

• 8:21Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, why not?

• 8:23Greg Jenner?

  So, you know, at age six, he's reciting the Iliad.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  They didn't have Facebook back in the day.

• 8:27Greg Jenner?

  My daughter's six, and she's, she's smart, but she's not doing the Iliad or, you know, anything like that.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  You're just not working hard enough.

• 8:32Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's my fault. It's clearly me.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  She's like, oh, but there's sunlight outside.

• 8:38Greg Jenner?

  So so far, little Frank is giving off Young Sheldon vibes. But I mean, you say brilliant and accomplished. He doesn't love school, Francis Galton. He's not, he doesn't excel emotionally at school.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  No, possibly because there isn't someone just holding his hand and telling him how brilliant he is the whole time. He apparently hated school. He said it was hateful in many ways and lovable in none. But that also might be part of his, like, looking back and mythologizing. It's like, no, school wasn't responsible for making me clever. I was born clever.

• 9:02Greg Jenner?

  Fair enough. So after dropping out of medical school and not getting his maths degree, or his honours degree at least, Galton got a huge windfall of cash when his father died. So Desiree, what would you do with a massive windfall? You know, you're young, you're 23, millionaire.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  I'd go back and do better at school.

• 9:21Greg Jenner?

  But no, I mean, Galton does the opposite thing. He does the sort of classic post-university holiday, but it's not lads, lads, lads, magaluf drinking. He's not even doing the kind of grand tour you do with Greece and Italy.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  He's like, I'm gonna go to Antarctica.

• 9:33Greg Jenner?

  He goes to Sudan and Syria.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Well, actually, he was originally off to Egypt. So this is why, this is where we can get a bit magaluf kind of situation, which is like that you could go under the Habia, which is a boat that will take you on a cruise, on a Nile cruise.

• 9:46Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  And so, but the thing that is exceptional is that he does go then further. So normally people stop at the second cataract, but he goes on further to Khartoum.

• 9:54Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And then he works his way back, yeah, via, via modern day Syria as well. He goes to Damascus.

• 9:58Greg Jenner?

  And he's, and he gets a, he gets a lovely medal from the Royal Geographic Society.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  For going on holiday?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  No, not quite. No, this is.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Congratulations. Young white explorer, you have done the correct thing. Here's your reward. What?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no. So this is where, this is where the ambition starts to come in. So like, his twenties, he's basically like having a great time, mostly drunk, mostly shooting things. And then.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Correct. Always. Okay.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  What else are you gonna do?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  And by the time he's 30, he does that thing that I think all of us do when we're 30, which is like, what am I doing with my life?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Actually, yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  And he's got this cousin who went on a trip around the world. David Livingstone has just discovered Nkengami. So he's like, southwest Africa. I'm gonna go to southwest Africa, and I'm going to be an explorer. And that is like in cahoots with the Royal Geographical Society. And his expedition there was so successful because he's so good at making maps of that area. And of course, we know that the British Empire runs on maps.

• 10:55Greg Jenner?

  We love a map.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  And because his maps were so accurate, this wins him the gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

• 11:00Greg Jenner?

  And when he's in South Africa, Galton meets a beautiful woman. And normally that story ends in a fairly conventional way, but not this one.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Does he need to study her or something?

• 11:10Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  And you will be my queen news project.

• 11:17Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, no, he describes her as having a beautiful outline, which is a weird chat up line.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Wait, he's met her where now again?

• 11:24Greg Jenner?

  South Africa.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  This is in South Africa, oh, she's got an interesting outline, I would imagine.

• 11:28Greg Jenner?

  And he's gonna get her measurements. She's from the indigenous Koi Koi people.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't, we don't know her name. All that we know about her is that she was probably, she was married to an interpreter, a Nama interpreter, who had learned Dhamra, which is the language that was useful in that area. And he was working for Reverend Hugo Hahn, who had his missionary out in Barmen.

• 11:47Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  I'm throwing lots of detail in there because we have so little about her. And what he's about to do is dehumanizing.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  There's like no two ways about it.

• 11:56Greg Jenner?

  I mean, he measures her with a sextant, as if she's, I mean, it's a navigational aid.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so he's just like, how much, how many hectares are you or something?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, this is the big.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  But I mean, this is the beginning of like phrenology and other like measuring things as well.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  This isn't the beginning, so he's well embedded in, there was a little bit of phrenology in those years in the twenties as well, where everyone measures his head and tells him how clever he is.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:20Greg Jenner?

  He gets back from Africa, he's measured African women, and now he needs to marry a British woman, as his custom, and he finds one, and she's called Louisa.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, that's right, Louisa Butler. And quite the whirlwind romance, so without wanting to sound like Craig David, he met her in January.

• 12:40Greg Jenner?

  Nice.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  And proposed in April, and they were married in August.

• 12:44Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So, yeah, no hanging about.

• 12:46Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Do you think he'd already pre-measured her and figured out that she was?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Well, he is very, I mean, she's the daughter of one of the ex-headmasters of Harrow, so like, her pedigree does count for a lot.

• 12:58Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so he's measured the family tree and gone, approved?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think she was, she was a good option. I mean, but we've also got like letters back and forth between the family saying, we think the great, we think the African explorer is smitten.

• 13:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yes, okay.

• 13:10Greg Jenner?

  So Louisa Jane Butler, his wife, when he writes his memoir, Desiree, how many times is Louisa mentioned in his entire memoir?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  I mean, the way you've set that up, like zero to one times?

• 13:22Greg Jenner?

  It's two times.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Okay, oh wow, I doubled my expectations.

• 13:27Greg Jenner?

  She's in the index twice, which is brutal.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  How does he refer to her those two times?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It's four pages worth of pedigree. And she's a supportive wife as well, like she's interested in his work, she's happy to support him in the things that he's doing. So he's probably under some kind of apprehension that she's cool with this.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  She will be interested, okay, but also it's kind of like, what else would she expect? Except for me to say how great she is because of her lineage, right? Like, that's the best compliment you could give.

• 13:52Greg Jenner?

  And they never have kids.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  They never have kids.

• 13:54Greg Jenner?

  And lots of people have speculated, there's a sort of litany of reasons given.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Mm, yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Well, especially since he's super into like, oh, like, you'd think he'd be like, let me have ten of my own specimens.

• 14:04Greg Jenner?

  Right, yeah, you'd think eugenicists would be like, we need more of me.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 14:08Greg Jenner?

  But other way, right?

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Unless there was, there's some reason they couldn't.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much the other way. So, yeah, we don't know whether this is deliberate child freeness, or whether this is a personal tragedy that's happening between these two people, and it's the nature of history that we're never gonna know.

• 14:20Greg Jenner?

  Sure, we need to get to the gloves, because we promised you gloves.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 14:23Greg Jenner?

  So let's get to the Galton gloves. He's going out measuring the statistical hotness of women around the UK in terms of their distribution in different cities.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Wait, he's trying to figure out where the hottest women are in the UK.

• 14:35Greg Jenner?

  Literally that, he's literally trying to figure out.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  But I mean, temperature hot, not like, that's a fitting, no, he's literally, so he's like the early Mark Zuckerberg, he's like the hotter not.

• 14:45Greg Jenner?

  That's the next joke in my script. He is literally Zuckerberg-ing his way around the UK, going, who's the hottest, where's the hottest city?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Can't see how this would go wrong.

• 14:53Greg Jenner?

  Can you talk us through it, Sabadra, like, what, what, okay, how do the gloves work? Because you had to care for the gloves in the collection.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  I did, and it is a thrill to be able to have to describe these physical objects to you in a sound-based medium. If you imagine a pair of gloves, if you imagine me wearing a pair, right-hand glove, nothing doing, don't worry about it, completely normal glove, don't worry about the right-hand glove, everything fine. Left-hand glove has been modified, it's got a felt pocket.

• 15:15Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Across the four fingers, and out of the thumb is the, the sharp end of a pin.

• 15:22Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  With, so into the felt pocket, what you can do is you can put a piece of paper. Now, I am Indian, so I can count to twenty on one hand.

• 15:31Greg Jenner?

  Ah.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  But got, so, because what we do is we count through the segments.

• 15:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yep. Thank you, this is, this is our gift to you.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  We've given other things to. How do you reckon Galton was counting with, with a pin prick?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  I don't know, just how many times a woman would scream every time he would touch them inappropriately with a pin prick.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Okay, thankfully, the pin never went near the woman.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  What he would do was, he would stand on street corners in various metropolitan centres around the UK.

• 15:55Greg Jenner?

  What a sentence, stand on street corners, measuring women, yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  With his hands in his pockets, so this is a covert counting device.

• 16:01Greg Jenner?

  Oh, this is gross.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Because he's like.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  So he's stabbing himself to count?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  He's stabbing himself, not himself, that's why you've got the felt pocket, the felt pocket stops him stabbing himself, he's stabbing the piece of paper. And it's a scale of one to three, the scale is attractive at one and repellent at the other, indifferent in the middle.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Hot, not, kind of okay, six out of ten, whatever the, kind of.

• 16:21Greg Jenner?

  Brown bag, yeah, beer goggles, three pints, six pints.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Oh, I liked him boobies.

• 16:26Greg Jenner?

  Oh my word, so he's standing on street corners around the cities of the UK.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Creepily staring at women, but this is fine.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in his sixties at this point, just to paint you a picture.

• 16:35Greg Jenner?

  And he's what, he's building a beauty map of Britain?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  This is what he called it, his beauty map of Britain, and it is important for his eugenic programme, because what he did was something that probably we, we might want to think about doing now, which is that he didn't discount women on the basis of their attractiveness. And he thought, the more attractive they are, the better incubators they are. He correlates attractiveness and athleticism with intelligence, jock and geek, right?

• 17:00Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  So nowadays, I feel like we kind of do the opposite.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, how does he control for the, like, okay, so.

• 17:06Greg Jenner?

  But that's an ancient Greek idea, yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so funny, you should ask, it's so funny, you should ask that. So he says, because he's the only one measuring, he is the control.

• 17:13Greg Jenner?

  Before we get to eugenics proper, I mean, we've done some, we've done a little bit of eugenics, haven't we? But before we get to like proper, like what he means by it, there are other very sort of important contributions that Francis Galton made to science. What sciences do you think they might be, Desiree?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know how much he did with his medicine, but I assume that he's a social scientist statistician, so that's where all of his contributions are gonna go.

• 17:37Greg Jenner?

  I mean, that's not a bad guess, I mean, I think the ones we'd probably, the ones we'd shout out, I think, would be meteorology, he's a weatherman.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 17:45Greg Jenner?

  Statistic, we've mentioned already.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Because of stats, yeah.

• 17:48Greg Jenner?

  Stats, and then I think the one that's really crucial would be psychology.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  He's the first person to develop a questionnaire, which is a fundamental tool in, in psychology, and he was looking at it to look at people's temperament or their character. And so he's describing them there as mild, docile, fretful, violent, and masterful.

• 18:06Greg Jenner?

  I think we need to get on to his proper eugenicist thinking. There's a huge response to his cousin's famous book of 1859, his cousin being Charles Darwin in that book, do you know what the book's called?

• 18:15Speaker 03

  The Origin of Species?

• 18:16Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, on the Origin of Species.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  There's probably a longer subtitle, right?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  By Means of Natural Selection.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  There you go, that's why, yeah.

• 18:21Greg Jenner?

  And so Charles Darwin sort of puts into the world this sort of extraordinary, groundbreaking, brilliant, brilliant book that's still to this day is still, you know, one of the foundational texts of modern biology, but how does Galton take to it?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Oh, he loves it.

• 18:35Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  He thinks it's the best thing anyone ever wrote.

• 18:38Greg Jenner?

  Did you guys see what my cousin did?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  I know.

• 18:40Greg Jenner?

  Cousin Charlie, yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  I've gotta start using this voice now, but to his cousin's genius idea, he adds his own genius idea. So Darwin, especially in the first bit of Origin, talks about animal domestication. And by the end of Origin, what Darwin has demonstrated is that all human life on earth has a common ancestor. What Darwin was trying to do was to say, hey, we're all connected, maybe we shouldn't be enslaving people. Whereas what Galton sees in Darwin's work is, humans are animals like any other. And as such, we should breed them better. And, but this is the tragic thing, is he wasn't the only one. So I think a lot of people know the expression survival of the fittest, which was coined by the economist Herbert Spencer, in reaction to what Darwin was talking about. The thing is, you can read that sentence two ways.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  The way Darwin meant it was, those who are the best fit for the environment in which they live. Whereas what Spencer, and then Galton, and then these other social Darwinists go is actually just who is fittest altogether. And we get to say who that is.

• 19:41Greg Jenner?

  Yes, should we understand him as a data gatherer, and then other people put in place policies? Or should we understand him as an advocate for eugenics in actual policy governments?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  I'm gonna plump for the latter, because I have here a long list of his publications, and all the time that he's publishing in scientific journals, he's giving papers at the Royal Society, he's also writing articles in Macmillan's magazine and Fortnightly Review. So this was very much a Brian Cox level of public understanding of science, making sure that his ideas were out there for people to get.

• 20:09Greg Jenner?

  Sure, just, you know, as the BBC, Professor Brian Cox, not eugenicist, a brilliant scientist, much beloved.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  But I mean, he, he's, in terms of like, he is a scientist, but he's also his own hype man really well, in terms of what he's.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's like, he understands that this is gonna be like a national project, he's gonna have like hearts and minds, you've got to get the people involved.

• 20:26Greg Jenner?

  So he's doing public engagement?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Public engagement of science.

• 20:30Greg Jenner?

  Okay, and he founds the laboratory in 1907, which is called the, I mean, it's at University College London.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  It is.

• 20:36Greg Jenner?

  And it's called the National Eugenics?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  It was originally founded in 1904. My colleagues at UCL have done a lot of work into the intricacies of this, but the long and the short of it is, is that by 1907, there is at UCL, the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

• 20:51Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  So it's a laboratory, so they're gathering data, so again, more pedigree stuff, more biometric stuff. After Galton dies and leaves money to the university for the chair of eugenics, it's being taught as well. So you can go back to the UCL calendars and the syllabus and see that eugenics is being taught in the biology department for a good forty, fifty years.

• 21:07Greg Jenner?

  That's how eugenics becomes the kind of dominant way of understanding the world through the sort of early 20th century, which then leads to. Hitler.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Via, via, via the US.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was going to say, which leads to America and then Hitler, which is amazing when you find, he's like, oh, I learned from the best. How we've ever posed ourselves as a moral authority on anything.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Like, were there, I mean, it's just interesting to be like, oh, is this the point at which we started putting like babies' footprints on a like birth certificate or something? Do you know what I mean? All of these things that we record about people automatically.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Only came in after Galton was like, hey, you need this information on people if you want to surveil them for the rest of their natural lives.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, he worked with a doctor called Frederick Mohammed, who is actually a descendant of Sheikh Dean Mohammed.

• 21:53Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Of this parish.

• 21:55Greg Jenner?

  We did an episode about him, but that's.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  So they worked together to develop this thing called the Life History Album, which was supposed to be sent out to every citizen. It's like a baby book, but really detailed them for the rest of your life.

• 22:05Greg Jenner?

  Let's get to the end of his life. In 1909, Francis Galton is knighted for his contribution to science, race science, but also, you know, a lot of the science that's still with us now, post eugenics and that.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  However, you want to make that distinction.

• 22:17Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I know. But he was poorly his whole life. This is a man who has many medical conditions, who has his own mental health crises over and over. He died in 1911. He left forty five thousand pounds to the UCL National Laboratory for Eugenesis Science, is it?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

• 22:34Greg Jenner?

  Thank you, yeah. Which of course.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Stop just branding them, but yeah.

• 22:37Greg Jenner?

  It's a lot of money. He left an awful lot of money to his, his project.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  In today's money, because I figured you might ask this, probably in the region of three and a half to four million pounds.

• 22:46Greg Jenner?

  I was saying, it's usually about ten, you sort of ten ratios, isn't it?

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Endowment.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  It's just a little, it's also the residue of his wealth. So after his endowments bequest to people in his life.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  All of the rest of the money.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  The iron-mongering slave banking money.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Goes to this.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Didn't go into everyone else's estates. I mean, is Louisa finally like, great, took him long enough for Roland in it?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I was gonna say she predeceased him by a little.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Ah, sad face.

• 23:12Greg Jenner?

  Sad face. And he didn't have any kids, so the, I guess the money went to his pet project.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:17Greg Jenner?

  Racism.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Eugenics was his baby.

• 23:19Greg Jenner?

  Great.

• 23:21Greg Jenner?

  The Nuance Window.

• 23:26Greg Jenner?

  On that note, time now for the Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Desiree and I silently measure the studio for two minutes. Data is important. While Subhadra takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about Sir Francis Galton. My stopwatch is, is ready. One second, I'll get it out. Take you away, Subhadra.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  When I was curator of the Galton Collection, I had a recurring nightmare. On a normal day, working behind the scenes in a storeroom, a glass lantern slide, a photograph of Francis Galton slips from my hand and smashes to pieces on the cold tiled floor. This was by no means an irrational concern. It is a well-known fact that the people most likely to damage museum objects are the people who work in museums. And Galton is already fragmented anyway. When I say that Francis Galton is the most important scientist most people have never heard of, it speaks to my experience as a history buff who never learned about him in history class. But of course, many people have heard of him, depending on who you ask. Weather forecasters, crime scientists, sociologists, psychology graduates, geneticists and statisticians all recognize the name of the man who made foundational contributions to their disciplines.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Even if you're not a scientist, he often features in trivia and fun facts. He's on QI all the time. But the Galton most people have heard of is in pieces. When eugenics was discredited after the Second World War and continues to be disproved through advances in genetics, his reputation was severely compromised. And it seems as though he disappeared into the footnotes. In this way, the wider absence of Galton's story is a story in itself. It's a story about the things we find easy to talk about and the things we don't. With his ideas about eugenics, Galton rebranded race science for the 20th century. Eugenics made race into a broad church, expanding notions about racial fitness to include disability, class, gender and sexuality, and also body size. People don't marginalize themselves.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  And whether we know it or not, this discredited science still has the power to shape how we talk about and how we see each other. To be critical of eugenics then isn't to be anti-science or the pursuit of knowledge as a whole. It just reminds us how the pursuit of an objective truth actually objectified people. The way Galton and his fellow eugenicists viewed the world, the ways in which they chose who to value in society, leaves a lot of people out. When we write Galton back in, when we put him back together again, we give ourselves the key to finding the other people we lost on his account.

• 25:48Greg Jenner?

  Amazing, thank you so much.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:50Greg Jenner?

  And very punctual, too.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, extraordinarily safe timing this out. When you, when you were talking about all that, I was like, I'm surprised he didn't invent the BMI as well.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Close, he came pretty close.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, somebody must have used that to do. I mean, did he, like, was he just sort of like chuffed his chips about his own work? Or did he start to see things happening and go like, oh, wait a second, not exactly that? Or was he just like, keep using it, this is all great?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the smoking gun on this one is he gave an interview to a journalist from a Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle. And the journalist was asking and saying, you know, we've been hearing about the persecution of Jewish people in Russia. What do you feel about this? And his reply is, do brace yourself, his reply is, you should be grateful that those weaker elements of your society are being weeded out for you.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ. Oh, wow. Okay. He's like, cause otherwise I'd have to take the whole arsenal of my family's guns and kill them myself so that we weren't continuing to bring them. So he was fully, I mean, but what, did he continue? Sorry, I, we need to go on, but like, was he sort of like, oh, but we need a slave class? Cause I mean, how else would he have money to fund his work if there hadn't been an underclass for, you know what I mean?

• 27:01Greg Jenner?

  Sure. I mean, the slave trade had been abolished by this point, you know, in the 1830s in theory, you know.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, slavery's still going.

• 27:08Greg Jenner?

  It's still happening, but it's abolished legally.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Like he didn't, you know, did he think that, oh, but we're always gonna need these people underneath us, they should just stay underneath us.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Not only do we need them, it's like, this is what they're best fit to do biologically.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  So it's like.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  So we can't kill them all.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  So he is more interested in how do we pick the good ones so that we can make sure that we, the British Isles, have good population control?

• 27:28Greg Jenner?

  I mean, it's extraordinary life. It's an important scientific legacy. It is now discredited science.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  It is.

• 27:34Greg Jenner?

  But we have to understand.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Still in everything.

• 27:36Greg Jenner?

  But it's still everywhere you look.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  We're still using questionnaires and personality tests at the very least.

• 27:39Greg Jenner?

  Absolutely. Thank you about most, you know, fantastic episode. It's been a problematic history as it is. Listener, if after today's episode you want another totally bananas boffin biography with Desiree, in fact, check out our episode on Pythagoras. He was an absolute lunatic.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, delicious lunatic.

• 27:55Greg Jenner?

  Amazing, fascinating.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  One loves a cult leader, right?

• 27:58Greg Jenner?

  For more 19th century eugenics and surprisingly funny, we've done an episode on the Kellogg Brothers, which is really good fun. And we did one on Victorian bodybuilding, again, surprisingly funny, but again, surprisingly eugenicist. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share the show with your friends. If you're in the UK, you can access episodes 28 days earlier by subscribing to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we had the sensational Subhadra Das. Thank you, Subhadra.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for letting me share this story.

• 28:26Greg Jenner?

  Thank you for doing it so eloquently and sensitively and also letting us do jokes. Cause you know, we, we do have to do the jokes. And in comedy corner, You're Dead to Me superstar Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  What a joy to learn about this racist.

• 28:43Greg Jenner?

  And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we measure the vital statistics of another forgotten historical figure. But for now, I'm off to go and stop my six-year-old from learning the Iliad because no good will come of it.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 28:55Greg Jenner?

  Bye.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm David Baddiel and from Radio 4 and the History Podcast, I'm hosting 60 Years of Hurt, a series about football and Englishness in which we try and define what Englishness actually is via the roller coaster history of the England men's football team. It includes contributions from various English gentlemen and women, Stephen Fry, David Seaman, England sports psychologist Pippa Grange and many others. England may or may not win the World Cup in 2026, but maybe you'll find out why it means so much to us as a country that they might do. Listen to 60 Years of Hurt on BBC Sounds.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with the tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder or scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai/solve.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Ever wondered what you would do if you found yourself lost in the wild? If disaster struck, would you make the right decisions to stay alive? Real Survival Stories from the Noiser Podcast Network brings you astonishing tales of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. It's the biggest tiger shark I've ever seen in my life.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  So I just swam. I just swam and swam as fast as I could. I realize those two parachutes tied up together is what a dead man sees. I am not gonna survive.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Real Survival Stories. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.