Powerful ideas like inheritance and evolution soon attract myths. Impressed by his studies of genius, (Jalton founded the science (if that is the right word) of eugenics. Its main aim was *to check the birth rate of the Unfit and improve the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriage of the best stock'. He led the new field of human genetics into a blind alley from which it did not emerge for half a century. At his death, he left £45,000 to found the Laboratory of National Eugenics at University College London and, in fine Victorian tradition, £2.00 to his servant who had worked for him for forty years. His research institute soon changed its name to the Galton Laboratory to escape from the eugenical taint. What became of his servant is not recorded.

Galton's social ideas and Darwin's evolutionary insights had a pervasive effect on the intellectual history of the twentieth century. They influenced left and right, liberal and reactionary, and continue — explicitly or otherwise — to do so. Many disparate figures trace their ideas to The Origin and to Hereditary Genius. All are united by one belief: in biology as destiny, in the power of genes over those who bear them. The most famous monument in Highgate Cemetery in London, a couple of miles north of today's Galton Laboratory, is that of Karl Marx. Its inscription is well known: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.' Darwinism was soon used in an attempt to live up to that demand. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, buried just across the path from Marx, founded what he called Social Darwinism; the notion that poverty and wealth are inevitable as they reflect the biological rules that govern society. In his day, Spencer was famous. His Times obituary cLiimcd that 'England has lost the most widely celebrated.nul influential of her sons.' Now he is remembered only ior that neatly circular phrase 'the survival of the fittest'.iiul lor inventing the word 'evolution'.

He wrote with a true philosopher's clarity: 'Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations'. Those lucid lines were parodied by a mathematical contemporary: 'A change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous somethingelsifications and sticktogetherations.'

Spencer used The Origin of Species as a rationale for the excesses of capitalism. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was one of many to be impressed by the idea that evolution excuses injustice. He invited Herbert Spencer to Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, the philosopher's response to his trip to see his theories worked out in steel and concrete was that 'Six months' residence here would justify suicide.'

Galton, too, supported the idea of breeding from the best and sterilising those whose inheritance did not meet with his approval. The eugenics movement joined a gentle concern for the unborn with a brutal rejection of the rights of the living (a combination not unknown today). Galton's main interest in genetics was as a means to forestall the imminent decline of the human race. He claimed that families of 'genius' had fewer children than most and was concerned about what this meant for the future. It was man's duty to interfere with his own evolution. As he said: 'What Nature does blindly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.' Perhaps his own childless state helped to explain his anxiety.

Many of the eugenicists shared the highly heritable attributes of wealth, education and social position. Francis Gal-ton gained his affluence from his family of Quaker gunmakers. Much of his agenda was the survival of the richest. Other eugenicists were on the left. They felt that if economies could be planned, so could genes. George Bernard Shaw, at a meeting attended by Galton in his last years, claimed that 'Men and women select their wives and husbands far less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks.' Later, he wrote that 'Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.' Shaw was, no doubt, playing his role as Bad Boy to the Gentry, but subsequent events made his tomfoolery seem even less droll than it did at the time.

Sometimes, such notions were put into practice. Paraguay has an isolated village with an unusual name: Nueva Germania, New Germany. Many of its inhabitants have blonde hair and blue eyes. Their names are not Spanish, but are more likely to be Schutte or Neumann. They are the descendants of an experiment; an attempt to improve humankind. Their ancestors were chosen from the people of Saxony in 1886 by Elisabeth Nietzsche — sister of the philosopher, who himself uttered the immortal phrase 'What in the world has caused more damage than the follies of the compassionate?' — as particularly splendid specimens, selected for the purity of their blood. The idea was suggested by Wagner (who once planned to visit). The New Germans were expected to found a community so favoured in its genetic endowment that it would be the seed of a new race of supermen. Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935 and Hitler himself wept at her funeral. Today the people of Nueva Germania arc poor, inbred and diseased. Their Utopia has failed.

The eugenics movement hatl an influence elsewhere in the New World. In 1898, Charles Davenport, then professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, was appointed as Director of the Cold Sprint* I larbor Laboratory on Long Island Sound. Initially, tin* 1,iU>r.itory concentrated on the study of *the normal variation of ihc animals in the harbor, lakes and woods, and the production of abnormalities'. It carried out sonic of ilic inosi important work in early twentieth-century biology.

Soon, Mrs E H Harriman, widow of the railway millionaire, decided to devote part of her fortune to the study of human improvement. The Eugenics Record Office was built next to the original laboratory. It employed two hundred field workers, who were sent out to collect pedigrees. Their 750,000 genetic records included studies of inherited disease and of colour blindness; but also recorded the inheritance of shyness, pauperism, nomadism, and moral control.

Davenport's work had an important effect on American society. The first years of the twentieth century saw eugeni-cal ciubs with prizes for the fittest families and, for the first time, medicine became concerned about whether its duty to the future outweighed the interests of some of those alive today. In Galtonian style, Davenport claimed that: 'Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also may it annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.' Twenty-five thousand Americans were sterilised because they might pass feeble-mindedness or criminality to future generations. One judge compared sterilisation with vaccination. The common good, he said, overrode individual rights.

Another political leader had similar views. The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut oft and scaled off before another year has passed." Such were the words of Winston Churchill when Home Secretary in 19 10. I lis beliefs were seen as so inflammatory by later British governments that they were not made public until 1992.