When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt

Eugenics, as would appear obvious from its subsequent career, is an evil thing to have fathered. Enthusiasm for Galton’s ideas led to the forcible sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and Europe deemed genetically unfit and contributed to Nazi racial policies that culminated in the Holocaust. Today, most of us can see that the notion of uplifting humanity by getting “desirables” to breed more and “undesirables” to breed less was misbegotten from the start, both on scientific and on ethical grounds. We look back at its progenitor with a slight shudder of revulsion and chalk it up to moral progress that we have put the Galtonian gospel behind us. But perhaps we should not be so smug. In the new age of genetic engineering, it is becoming apparent that the eugenic temptation has not gone away at all; it is simply taking a new form, one that may prove harder to resist. If Galton, as our image of him would have it, was a talented and fundamentally decent man seduced by an evil concept, it might be of more than historical interest to reconsider how he went wrong.