In 1890, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote: “In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the subject of the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes” (Wallace 1900, I, 509; first published in the Fortnightly Review [1890]). This fits with what Darwin himself had written in the Descent of Man.

Eugenics

Darwin was responding to scares started by his cousin Francis Galton (half-cousin, actually; they shared Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather), who in his recently published Hereditary Genius (1869) argued that intellectual ability was something transmitted by heredity from earlier generations rather than simply a matter of environment and education, and that it would be “quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations” (Galton 1869, 1). We see now both the positive side and the negative side to what was to be labeled the science or hope of “eugenics” – on the one hand one can try to make for a better race of humans, and on the other hand one can try to prevent the decline of the present race of humans. Either way, one is using one’s knowledge of evolution and its processes to improve the state of humankind, individually or collectively. (Kevles 1985 is the definitive study of eugenics.)