![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Galton’s racism was deep, consistent and robust, even for his era,” Rutherford writes. It was an intention shared by many, but Galton’s name was formally removed from UCL premises in 2020 because of the role he’d played. He gave a name – from the Greek, roughly meaning “well born” – to a discipline that aimed to improve humanity at the population level. ![]() Francis Galton was the father of modern eugenics. He begins with a potentially controversial admission: “All science is political.” His own undergraduate study took place at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, an institution with a unique perspective on how scientific endeavour can be sullied by political ideology. As a geneticist and author of books such as How to Argue with a Racist, Rutherford aims to distil a rounded, scientific analysis from the deeply tainted and overheated subject of eugenics. “For just over a century, we have referred to the deliberate crafting of society specifically by biological design with a word which was for half of its existence regarded as desirable, and for the other half, poisonous,” he writes. It takes patience to trace the complicated web linking these ideas, and Rutherford does so with much-needed nuance and an absence of alarmism. ![]()
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