Tag Archives: eugenics

I hope that you will tolerate this post, as it is mostly me thinking out loud. Thinking out-loud, whats more, about a potentially distressing subject, namely that of the relationship between the history of biology, genetics and statistics (which are, after all, tied tightly together) and eugenics - the project of increasing the fitness of the human gene pool, by controlling the breeding or death rates of various parts of the population.

The problem I have is that many people that I would call my heroes, or at least people along whose intellectual footpaths I wander (Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, John Maynard Keynes) supported the eugenics movement. Am I to assume that all these people, while intellectual giants, were monsters or fools? Can we (you and I, for by embarking on this journey with me you too, kind reader, must shoulder my burden) find where these people went wrong, and what can we learn by looking at those people who shunned eugenics?

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