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he certainly aspired to be. ‘I find that talent is transmitted by inheritance in a very remarkable degree,’ he had written in an essay titled ‘Hereditary Character and Talent’. His idea drew on his cousin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, that individuals in a population show a wide variety of characteristics, but those with the characteristics most suited to the environment will survive and breed, passing on those beneficial traits. Galton thought that a race of people could be more quickly improved if the most intelligent were encouraged to reproduce, while the stupidest weren’t – the same way you might artificially breed a fatter cow or a redder apple. For him, this would speed up human evolution, driving the race closer to mental and physical perfection.

      As an example, he drew on the fact that brilliant writers were often related to other brilliant writers. He noted that of 605 notable men who lived between 1453 and 1853, one in six were related. The ingredients for greatness must be heritable, he reasoned, choosing to overlook that being notable might also be a product of connections, privilege and wealth, which these men also had. ‘If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!’ Galton dreamed of a ‘utopia’ of highly bred super people, and he made creating one his lifelong mission.

      The first challenge would be to measure people’s abilities, to build up a bank of data about who exactly were the most intelligent and who the least. In 1904 he convinced the University of London to set up the world’s first Eugenics Record Office at 50 Gower Street, dedicated to measuring human differences, in the hope of understanding what kind of people Britain might want more of. University College London jumped at the chance, replying to his request within a week. After a short time the department became known as the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

      Eugenics is a word that’s no longer used around here. Long after Galton’s death, his laboratory was renamed the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, housed in the Darwin Building. And this is where Subhadra Das steps in. Among the vast collection of objects she is responsible for at the university is Galton’s archive, containing his personal photographs, equipment and papers, tracking the genesis and development of eugenics. She also looks after objects belonging to his close collaborator, mathematician Karl Pearson, who became the first professor of national eugenics in 1911 after Galton died. ‘Pearson’s greatest contribution, the thing that people remember him for, is founding the discipline of statistics. A lot of work on that was done with Galton. Galton, if you’re going to bring his science down to anything in particular, is a statistician,’ she tells me.

      But before he settled down into science, Galton had been an explorer. He was lavishly funded by the estate of his father, who had made a fortune from supplying weapons that helped support the slave trade, and later from banking. An expedition in 1850 to Namibia, then known as Damaraland, earned Galton a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Always proud of his appearance (there’s a hand mirror and sewing kit among his possessions in the collection), he donned a white safari suit, becoming one of the first to cultivate what is now the classic image of the white European in Africa. ‘If I say to you “African explorer”, the picture that pops into your head? That’s him,’ Das tells me.

      What was unusual about Galton was that travel failed to broaden his mind. His encounters with people in other countries didn’t help him to see their common humanity. ‘If anything, his racist assumptions were made stronger by his time in Africa.’ As Galton told the Royal Society on his return, ‘I saw enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life.’

      In London, racism combined in his scientific research with a passion for data. Galton was obsessed with measuring things, once using a sextant to size up an African woman’s proportions from a distance. Another time, he came up with the mathematical formula for the perfect cup of tea. Through eugenics he saw a way of using what he thought he knew about human difference, shored up by Darwin’s theories of natural selection, to systematically improve the quality of ‘the British race’. ‘Darwin said that humans are animals like any other animal. Galton said, well, if that’s the case then we can breed them better,’ Das explains. ‘What he was concerned about was what he saw as the degeneration of the British race and how that could be prevented and improved.

      ‘You have to call Galton a racist because the work that he did is fundamental in the story of scientific racism. So not only is he a racist, he is part of the way we invented racism, and the way that we think about it.’

      *

      Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. It also assumes that almost all that we are is decided before we are born.

      The origins of this idea – that everything is inherited, that it’s in the genes – date back to the middle of the nineteenth century when Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became fascinated by plant hybrids. Working in the garden of his monastery, Mendel took seven strains of pea and bred them selectively until each one produced identical offspring every time. With these true-bred pea plants, he began to experiment, observing carefully to see what happened when different varieties were crossed. Nobody knew about genes at this point, and Mendel’s paper on the topic published in 1866 went largely unnoticed within his lifetime. But his experimental finding that traits such as colour were being passed down the generations in certain patterns would form the linchpin of how geneticists in the following century thought about inheritance.

      Once scientists understood that there were discrete packets of information in our cells that dictated how our bodies were built, and that we got these packets in roughly equal measure from each parent, the science of heredity finally took off. And it took almost no time for the political implications to be recognised. In 1905 the English biologist William Bateson, Mendel’s principal populariser, predicted that it ‘would soon provide power on a stupendous scale’.

      Mendelism became a creed, an approach to thinking about human biology which suggested that it is largely set in motion as soon as an egg is fertilised, and that things then go on to work in fairly linear fashion. If you crossed one yellow-seeded pea plant with one green-seeded pea plant and you could predict which colours subsequent generations of pea plant would turn out to have, then it stood to reason that you might be able to predict how human children would look and behave based on the appearance and behaviour of their parents.

      Through a narrow Mendelian lens, almost everything is planned by our genes. Environment counts for relatively little because we are at heart the products of chemical compounds mixing together. We are inevitable mixtures of our ancestors. Just as Bateson foresaw, this idea became the cornerstone of eugenics, the belief that better people could be bred by selecting better parents. ‘Mendelism and determinism, the view that heredity is destiny, they go together,’ says historian Gregory Radick, who has studied Mendel and his legacy.

      But there was a problem with Mendel’s pea plant research. At the beginning of the twentieth century Mendel’s paper became the subject of ferocious debate, says Radick. ‘Should the Mendelian view be the big generalisation around which you hang everything else? Or on the contrary, was it an interesting set of special cases?’ When Mendel performed his experiments, he deliberately bred his peas to be reliable in every generation. Before he even began, he filtered out the aberrations, the random mutants, the messy spread of continuous variation you would normally see, so every generation bred as true as possible. Peas were either green or yellow. This allowed him to see a clear genetic signal through the noise, producing results that were far more perfect than nature would have provided.

      Raphael Weldon, born in 1860, a professor at the University of Oxford with an interest in applying statistics to biology, spotted this dilemma and began campaigning for scientists to recognise the importance of environmental as well as genetic backgrounds when thinking about inheritance. ‘What really bothered him about the emerging Mendelism was that it turned its back on what he regarded as the last twenty years of evidence from experimental embryology, whose message was that the effects a tissue has on a body depend radically on what it’s interacting with, on what’s

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