Daniel Kemp - Jan 3, 2009
In the other book I read, In the Minds of Men by Ian T. Taylor, it talked about eugenics. I wanted to learn more about eugenics, so the librarian recommended me this book, The Legacy of Malthus : The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism by Allan Chase.

[Francis] Galton’s next step to gaining acceptance by orthodox science was to coin the name “eugenics” from the Greek; the term means “well-born”. Here was the science to produce the utopian dream of a super-race to control tomorrow’s world. The dream began to be realized in 1901 with the founding of the Eugenics Education Society, based at the statistics department of University College, London. Galton lived to see the Eugenics Society eventually become a flourishing political movement, while the work on which it was all founded, the calipers and stopwatch (to measure reaction times) applied to the heads of idiots and criminals, was given scientific respectability in the professional journal Biometrika, founded and edited, of course, by Galton and [Karl] Pearson.
Before Galton died in 1911, some of the scientific community had evidently become convinced. He received many honors, including the Darwin and Wallace medal, the Copley medal, the Huxley medal, and a knighthood. However, divine retribution forbade that he should live to fulfill his own eugenic obligation. Scion of two prominent English families, married to the daughter of a third, Sir Francis Galton had died without issue. [1]

[Francis] Galton’s (1869) thesis is summed up in his statement, “to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable . . . the word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea” (p. 24). [2]

Malthus is that guy Thomas Malthus. He was talked about in the book In the Minds of Men by Ian T. Taylor. He’s the guy who was influenced by a made-up story about goats and dogs on an island. He also made-up data in his popular Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus is best known for coming up with the myth that the planet can’t feed the population of people on it. So this book, The Legacy of Malthus, is about the legacy of the founding father of scientific racism, which is Thomas Malthus.

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