Hereditary Character and Talent: As Found Originally in MacMillan’s Magazine in 1865

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A half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton was uniquely positioned to be one of the first to consider how the principles Darwin laid out in his Origin of the Species could be applied to the human race. Indeed, Galton would be the one to coin the word ‘eugenics.’ In Galton’s influential Hereditary Character and Talent , he argued that if physical attributes could be subjected to Darwinian principles of selection, ‘mental qualities’ could be as well. He generated a list of ‘notable persons’ in order to demonstrate that intelligence and excellence were hereditary. Today, such applications of Darwinism are cavalierly dismissed as ‘pseudo-science, ’ but there was a time, not so long ago, when they were simply accepted as pure, straight-forward, rock solid, science. This edition is carefully reproduced from Galton’s essay, published in two parts, in MacMillan’s Magazine, in 1865.