n the merely statistical estimates of a few years ago. Abnormalities such as hemophilia, albinism, and a number of structural abnormalities can be inherited, and there are hopes today that genetic screening can reduce their incidence ("Francis Galton and the Eugenics Society").
Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Late in the nineteenth century, he coined the term eugenics as he studied heredity and intelligence. He defined his new word this way: "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally." He wanted more than a study of the issue, though, and called for a practical policy that would introduce the idea "into the national consciousness as a new religion" ("Francis Galton and the Eugenics Society"). He cited the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man as the event which freed science from old ideas and pointed to something completely new.
Galton read his paper "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims" in 1904 to a meeting of the Sociological Society held at the London School of Economics. There was much dissension from Galton's paper, however, and since the society proved quite unsuited to the role envisaged for it by Galton, he helped found the Eugenics Education Society in 1907 (Jones 6). Galton always promoted a form of social Darwinism because he feared that his own country was threatened with decline brought on by social class differentials in fertility. In his Inquiries into Human Faculty in 1883, Galton complained that those who possessed sufficient foresight and self control to delay marriage, as advised by Malthus, were exactly the people whose reproduction it was vital to encourage. Galton believed that ability is determined by heredity and runs in families, so the early marriage and reproduction of members of such "thriving families" ought to be encouraged. He tho...