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

by Jim Holt

Galton might have puttered along for the rest of his life as a minor gentleman-scientist had it not been for a dramatic event: the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Reading his cousin’s book filled Galton with a sense of clarity and purpose. One thing in it struck him with special force: to illustrate how natural selection shaped species, Darwin cited the breeding of domesticated plants and animals by farmers to produce better strains. Perhaps, Galton dreamed, human evolution could be deliberately guided in the same way. “If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!” he wrote in an 1864 magazine article, his opening eugenic salvo. (It was two decades later that he coined the actual word “eugenics,” from the Greek for “wellborn.”)