Eugenics and the Modern Synthesis, Part I (Jessica Riskin, March 23, 2026, Los Angeles Review of Books)
[B]ateson saw eye to eye with his friend Francis Galton, Charless Darwin’s first cousin, who was also a Scientific Calvinist predestinarian, persuaded that people’s destinies were indelibly inscribed in them by the biological mechanism of inheritance. “[P]retensions of natural equality,” Galton said, were morality tales for children. Innate “mental capacity” followed “the law of deviation from an average”: “the range of mental power between—I will not say the highest Caucasian and the lowest savage—but between the greatest and least of English intellects, is enormous.” Galton coined the term “eugenic” to designate the scientific “cultivation of race,” composing the name from Greek roots meaning “good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.” He developed some of the fundamental concepts of statistics, including correlation, deviation, and regression, to provide a mathematical basis for this new “science of improving stock.” Bateson, too, became keenly interested in eugenics, as we will see.
Bateson’s encounter with Mendel’s paper launched a process that would lead, over the subsequent decades, to what Julian Huxley would name “the modern synthesis”: a marriage of neo-Darwinian theory with Mendelian genetics that has served as the central paradigm of evolutionary biology ever since. At the time of Bateson’s momentous train journey, Huxley—the grandson of T. H. Huxley, an evolutionist and friend of Charles Darwin—was not quite 13 years old, but he would grow up to become a biologist like his grandfather, a neo-Darwinist and also a eugenicist. The other architects of the modern synthesis, too, like Bateson and Huxley, were fervent believers in eugenics. Their eugenic logic and ideology are built into the deep structure of the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolutionary biology, tightly connected to the principle that all organisms, including humans, are the passive objects of their genetic fate.