Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi

The Origin of Species even changed the life of Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton. The father of modern statistics, Galton created the concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean and blazed the trail for the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data. In Hereditary Genius (1869), he used his data to popularize the myth that parents passed on hereditary traits like intelligence that environment could not alter. “The average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own,” Galton wrote. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,” claiming that nature was undefeated. Galton urged governments to rid the world of all naturally unselected peoples, or at least stop them from reproducing, a social policy he called “eugenics” in 1883.16