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

by Jim Holt

Galton’s eugenic proposals were benign compared with those of famous contemporaries who rallied to his cause. H. G. Wells, for instance, was an unabashed advocate of negative eugenics, declaring that “it is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” George Bernard Shaw championed eugenic sex as an alternative to prescientific procreation through marriage. “What we need,” Shaw said, “is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see each other again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honor.” Although Galton was a conservative, his creed caught on with progressive figures like Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In the United States, New York disciples founded the Galton Society, which met regularly in the American Museum of Natural History, and popularizers helped the rest of the country become eugenic-minded. “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle—and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to ‘blind’ sentiment?” asked a placard at an exposition in Philadelphia.