How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

by Adam Rutherford

I did not choose UCL because of its peculiar history, though I was enrolled in the Galton Laboratory, which was once called the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, and was taught by the Galton Professor in the Galton Lecture Theatre, all named after Francis Galton – a man whose intellectual legacy includes weather maps, a phalanx of essential statistical techniques, forensic fingerprints and the scientific concept of eugenics, as well as the word itself. Galton died in 1911, and the men who followed him at my alma mater were similarly great scientists: the statistician Karl Pearson, the mathematical biologist Ronald Fisher and others, men on whose shoulders stand entire domains of contemporary science, and who, to varying degrees, also expressed racist views. To call them racist is not a judgement based on contemporary sensibilities, it is a factual statement; they articulated opinions that were racist, as were the cultural and scientific norms at the time.