From Galton to California: The Afterlife of Eugenics

In 1883, British polymath Francis Galton coined a new science.
He called it eugenics — from the Greek eu-genēs, meaning “well-born.”
Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, believed that if natural selection shaped species, society could improve itself by guiding human breeding.
His ambition was statistical: to apply the tools of measurement and heredity to morality itself.
What began as Victorian curiosity became one of the most consequential — and destructive — social experiments of the twentieth century.

The Arithmetic of Heredity

Galton’s early research combined genealogy with mathematics.
In 1869, his book Hereditary Genius used family records of scientists, judges, and artists to argue that intellectual ability was inherited.
To test his hypothesis, he developed the first regression and correlation formulas — the same statistical methods still taught in econometrics today.
In 1884, he founded London’s Anthropometric Laboratory, where thousands of visitors paid to have their heads measured and reflexes timed.

By 1907, Galton’s followers organized the Eugenics Education Society (later the Galton Institute), which campaigned for selective breeding and sterilization laws.
What he saw as social optimization, others quickly weaponized.

The American Adoption

Eugenic ideas crossed the Atlantic in the early 1900s, finding fertile ground in a nation obsessed with progress and immigration control.
Biologist Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910, funded by the Carnegie Institution.
By the 1920s, eugenics had become public policy.
Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two U.S. states passed sterilization laws targeting those labeled “unfit,” including the disabled, the poor, and ethnic minorities.

California led the movement.
The state performed roughly 20,000 sterilizations, nearly one-third of the national total.
Institutions like the Sonoma State Home and Patton State Hospital carried out procedures sanctioned by doctors and judges.
Supporters included prominent academics from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, who argued that science justified social engineering.

The Global Echo

The consequences were global.
German scientists studying American sterilization laws cited California’s statutes as legal precedent.
When the Nazi regime introduced its Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, it explicitly referenced American models.
Over the next decade, Nazi doctors sterilized more than 400,000 people and later escalated the logic of “biological purification” into genocide.

After World War II, the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials discredited eugenics publicly, yet many of its methods persisted under new names: population control, behavioral genetics, and human capital optimization.

California’s Continuity

California officially repealed its sterilization law only in 1979.
Archival research published by historian Alexandra Minna Stern (University of Michigan) shows that the practice continued informally into the 1980s within prisons and mental institutions.
As recently as 2014, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that the California Department of Corrections authorized 148 sterilizations of female inmates between 2006 and 2010 without proper consent.

In 2021, the state approved a compensation fund of US $7.5 million for surviving victims — roughly $25,000 per person.
The official apology described the program as “an unconscionable violation of human rights under the guise of medical progress.”

The Technocratic Afterlife

While coercive eugenics receded, its logic reappeared in subtler forms.
The rise of genetic testing, IQ normalization, and data-driven social scoring revived the ideal of optimization — not by law, but by market.
Biotech companies advertise embryo screening for “polygenic risk scores” predicting disease and intelligence; recruitment algorithms score applicants on “cognitive fit.”
The metrics are more complex, but the premise remains: that human potential can be ranked and filtered.

Economists have found measurable effects.
A 2022 Nature Human Behaviour study analyzing 11 million polygenic scores warned that genetic models explain only 10–15 percent of educational variance, yet are often misused in policy and private-sector analytics.
The old eugenics operated through law; the new version operates through data.

Lessons of Misapplied Measurement

What unites both eras is faith in quantification.
Galton’s discovery of regression — a method for describing variation — was never meant to erase it.
But as historian Theodore Porter observed in Trust in Numbers (1995), modern societies treat measurement itself as moral proof.
When numbers become ethics, bias becomes invisible.

The challenge for twenty-first-century science is not only to avoid coercion but to recognize how the pursuit of perfection reproduces hierarchy.
The genome, like the dataset, reflects history as much as biology.

Closing Reflection

From London to California to Silicon Valley, eugenics evolved with its instruments.
It moved from skull calipers to spreadsheets, from laboratories to algorithms.
Each promised improvement; each confused control with virtue.
The enduring lesson is statistical humility: that human worth cannot be optimized without error — or without cruelty.

Citation Note:
Primary sources — Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869); Essays in Eugenics (1909); Charles Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (1910).
Quantitative references — U.S. State sterilization data (Lombardo 2011; Stern 2016); Nature Human Behaviour Vol. 6 (2022); California Victim Compensation Board (2021).
Secondary sources — Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation (2016); Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (1985); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers (1995).

This article was written with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2025).