They dabbled in the
dark arts of social
engineering
They opened the doors to a little
grey invasion of Britain
In November 1859, barnacle-obsessive Charles
Darwin published his most famous work: On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selec-
tion. Darwin visualised life on Earth as a mighty
tree, covering the world with its “ever branching
and beautiful ramifications”. Since then, data
from all fields of science has shown that natural
selection is a powerful driver that shapes
species. It’s an idea that is as simple as it is
powerful, and an example of Victorian scientific
thinking at its very best.
But it was Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton,
who took this great theory too far. As well as
inventing forensic fingerprinting and weather
maps, Galton proposed that encouraging the
most intelligent people to have children – while
discouraging those at the lower end – would
shift the curve and create a cleverer society.
Coining the term ‘eugenics’ to describe his
idea, Galton did not live to see it taken to
grotesque extremes. Eugenics was still
practised in some forms well into the 20th
century, including enforced sterilisation of
‘undesirables’ in the US and the enthusiastic
promotion of birth control for native citizens
living in British colonies.
e Victorians were big fans of the
tural world, and wealthier
izens built grand museums,
os, parks, aquariums and
iaries to display their biological
bounty. Acclimatisation societies
s rang up, taking British animals
d plants to the colonies to
p ovide a taste of home in exotic
mes. Foreign species were
i roduced to the UK in return,
i cluding American grey squirrels
d Japanese knotweed.
The grey invaders quickly
t-competed their native red
usins (as well as giving them
eadly squirrelpox), while Japa-nese knotweed ran rampant across
the gardens of England. On the
positive side, Charles Darwin
engineered a scheme to ‘re-green’
the desolate south Atlantic island
of Ascension. Although Darwin’s
experiment revealed how to bring
ruined landscapes back to life,
today’s conservationists are still
struggling with the Victorian legacy
of invasive species. ßAn anthropologist measures
a child’s cranium in
Germany, 1932. Such
practices were inspired by
the eugenicist Francis
Galton half a century earlierT
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deDr Kat Arney is a science writer,
broadcaster and author of Herding
Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our
Genes Work (Bloomsbury, 2016)