In Pursuit of the Gene

4 ¨ VIVA PANGENESIS
in the thought that he had passed on to his children not only his frail constitution
but his highly virtuous mental habits. Despite his legendary reputation
for balanced, evenhanded weighing of evidence, Darwin grew so attached
to the Lamarckian principle that he permitted himself to be carried
away: “It is probable,” he wrote in Variation, “that hardly a change of any
kind affects parents without some kind of mark being left on the germ.” 8
¨ FRANCIS GALTON, who was Charles Darwin’s half first cousin, read
Variation with great excitement, scribbling furiously in the margins as he
read. Just as it had ten years earlier when he first read the Origin, Darwin’s
work took hold of Galton and changed the course of his life. 9 The three
chapters on inheritance fascinated him most of all. For many years now,
Galton had been developing his own ideas about inheritance, which he had
first set forth in a long article for Macmillan’s, a high-brow literary magazine,
in the summer of 1865. 10 While Darwin had carefully skirted the case of
man in presenting the thesis of descent from a common ancestor, hoping
to avoid the additional controversy that was sure to result by insisting on
man’s animal nature, his less diplomatic cousin plunged right into the
heart of the controversy.
Contrary to the widespread belief that each human soul is created by
God, Galton insisted that mental as well as physical traits are inherited.
Furthermore, he insisted, just as it is possible by careful selection to produce
a superior breed of cattle or horse, it ought to be possible to produce a
superior race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive
generations. 11 Eighteen years later, he would introduce the term eugenics,
from the Greek eugene, for “good in stock,” and devote his considerable energy
to laying the groundwork for a national eugenics program. 12 His first
goal, however, was to demonstrate that human intelligence and character
are inherited to the same degree as any physical feature in humans or animals.
To prove his point, Galton designed a simple statistical study that
purported to show that relatives of eminent people are far more likely to
be eminent than randomly chosen members of the educated public, and
thus that exceptional talent could be passed from one generation to the
next. In this, his first treatment, he quickly glossed over his erroneous as-