In his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius, he assembled long lists of “eminent” men—judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers—to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages, rather than biology, might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of popes as a kind of control group. His case that mental ability was largely hereditary elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense,” he wrote to Galton, “for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect,
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