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What was unusual about Galton was that travel failed to broaden his mind. “A lot of white Europeans, on going to Africa and living cheek by jowl with African people, tended to change their opinions,” she says. “Galton didn’t. If anything, his racist assumptions were made stronger by his time in Africa.”
Another vocal critic of eugenics was the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had come from humble beginnings to become an important and well-loved researcher and was credited with coming up with the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Darwin. “The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,” he warned. “Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. “Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.”
Take Otmar von Verschuer, who had plundered the tiny bodies of Auschwitz victims for his twin studies during the Holocaust: after being banned from teaching temporarily, in 1951 he became professor of human genetics at the University of Münster. Many scientists similarly changed tack, gently maneuvering themselves out of eugenics into allied fields that studied human difference in less controversial and more rigorous ways, such as genetics.
There is actually no guarantee that two beautiful and brilliant parents will produce brilliant and beautiful kids. Genetics is bit more of a crapshoot.
