“He attached so exaggerated an importance to biological inheritance, that he seemed to think almost every quality of human personality could be explained thereby.” Poverty, laziness, the ability to classify birds—all simply a matter of the blood! David Starr Jordan was one of the first to bring Galton’s ideas back to America. As early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fever, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University, informing students that traits like “pauperism” and “degener[acy]” were heritable and thus could be “exterminated
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