Label:
Galton and the beginnings of Eugenics, James Watson
Description:
Interviewee: James Watson
DNAi Location:
Chronicle>Threat of the unfit>founders
Inherited genius?
In the 19th century Francis Galton argued that genius and talents are inherited, but he had no idea about the mechanism of heredity.
Founders of the movement
The term eugenics, meaning "well born," was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a scientist at University College in London. Galton's conception of eugenics had arisen from his earlier study, Hereditary Genius (1869), in which he used data from biographical dictionaries and alumni records at Oxford and Cambridge Universities to construct pedigrees of leading English families. He concluded that superior intelligence and abilities were inherited with an efficiency of about 20% among primary relatives in these families. Galton also studied the distribution of physical attributes in human populations, from which he and his student Karl Pearson derived the corpus of modern statistics – including chi-square, regression, and correlation.
During the first decade of the 20th century, eugenics was organized as a scientific field by the confluence of Mendelian genetics and agricultural breeding. This synthesis was embodied by the Harvard-trained zoologist Charles Davenport, who was among the first American scientists to embrace Mendelian genetics. Davenport published the classical description of the inheritance of eye color in 1907 and also did creditable studies of the genetics of albinism and neurofibromatosis.
In 1910, Davenport obtained funds from Mrs. E.H. Harriman to found a Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport recruited as superintendent Harry Laughlin, a Missouri school teacher with whom he shared an interest in chicken breeding. The ERO became the epicenter of American eugenics – conducting family studies, publishing "how to" books and journals, training case workers, and amassing hundreds of thousands of pedigrees and articles.
James Watson discusses the founding of eugenics and explores some archival materials remaining from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor.
Biological elements:
Concepts precesses:
heredity, inheritance
Tools & methods :