As mentioned in an earlier post in this series, the first life line thrown to the eugenics-free Charles Darwin is the fact that Francis Galton hadn't gotten around to naming his new "science" "eugenics" until 1883, the year after Charles Darwin died. And as mentioned in a note yesterday, George Darwin, Charles' son, was one of the earliest to take up eugenics - as can be seen in Charles Darwin's letter to Galton, it was George who read "Hereditary Genius" first and enthusiastically recommended it to his father.
I came across this answer to the claim that Charles Darwin couldn't have inspired eugenics because of it didn't have a name by the time he died, made by a source whose authority to say what he did is about as solid as possible.
Francis Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the brother of George Darwin, wrote a memoir of his brother when his scientific papers were collected and published after George's death. It's clear that Francis Darwin saw no problem in identifying his brother's article "On Beneficial Restriction to Liberty of Marriage" as a "eugenic article" despite it having been published a decade before Galton coined the word "eugenics".
In spite of unwellness he [George Darwin] began in 1872-3 to write on various subjects. He sent to Macmillan's Magazine an entertaining article, "Development in Dress," where the various survivals in modern costume were recorded and discussed from the stand-point of evolution. In 1873 he wrote "On benefical restriction to liberty of marriage," a eugenic article for which he was attacked with gross un-fairness and bitterness by the late St George Mivart. He was defended by Huxley, and Charles Darwin formally ceased all intercourse with Mivart.
Francis Darwin: BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS [of George Howard Darwin] From Scientific Papers of George Howard Darwin vol. Five
Development in Dress discussed form the standpoint of evolution? How far out on a limb were the Darwins prepared to go with the old man's ideas? It sounds like it might have be in the running as the first "Just So" story of the evo-psy kind in history.
St. George Mivart, an early convert to Darwinism, is an interesting case. As a professor and a Darwinian, he attended lectures on Darwinism given by Thomas Huxley and came away more skeptical than he had been when he started.
As to 'natural selection', I accepted it completely and in fact my doubts & difficulties were first excited by attending Prof. Huxley's lectures at the School of Mines.*
Some of the things he was skeptical of were probably due to the problems that many other competent biologists had with Darwinism. Natural selection in the 1860s and 70s was hardly a complete theory. It didn't achieve its modern form until the 1930s with the Mendelian synthesis. Mivart held it wasn't legitimately a theory but a hypothesis at the time of the dust up. No doubt Charles Darwin was stung by having a fairly well known convert turn to a skeptic.
The incident of Mivert's criticism of George Darwin's article, which argued, among other things, that marriages should be dissolved if one of the couple was declared insane, seems to have caused Charles Darwin to set his bulldog on Mivart, later to take his own revenge.
Darwin's revisions to the Origin eventually compromised it, so keen was he to respond to critics. Not only did he defend, he attacked. It is hard to know which to admire more, the skill with which he and his band of disciples went about preparing the ground for the Origin (shrewdly distributing advance copies to potential opponents, for example) or the zeal with which they all, after publication, set about savaging (not always fairly) the critics. Although we are familiar with Huxley's role as Darwin's bulldog, Darwin was quite capable of being his own rottweiler. When a paper by his son Francis was rejected by the Royal Society, Darwin ruthlessly counterattacked in Nature. In 1873, St. George Mivart got into a spat with Darwin's son George over a sort of proto-eugenics. Darwin nearly went to court on behalf of George (who was in the wrong) and later blackballed Mivart for membership in the Athenaeum.
Keith Thomson: American Scientist, Jan.-Feb., 2003
But whether or not Mivart was unjust in his criticism doesn't concern me here. What is important is that Charles Darwin was aware of his son, George, publicly advocating eugenics in the form of nullifying marriages. Something that was pretty shocking for 1870s Britain. And young George apparently didn't think that once recovered, the formerly insane should be able to resume the abolished marriage. He compared it to someone being retired not being able to get his job back. That's a seriously coercive proposal, I'd say. And, obviously, what George said in the article was all right by his father who, on most matters like that, is as prim as a Victorian.
And, the reason I am posting this, his own brother, Francis, said, using the "E word", the proposal his father had no problem with and supported was "eugenics".
* Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875, p. 137.
His discussion of how St. George Mivart fell from grace to be attacked by the Darwin inner circle is an antidote to the pious version of Darwin most people are familiar with from sources like the BBC and PBS. I will note that Mivart wasn't exactly innocent in the brawl, getting in a few punches, himself. Mivart was certainly wrong about many aspects of evolution, as was everyone else during that period, including Charles Darwin. They were all, Darwinist and anti-Darwinist, going far, far past the point supported by evidence. Desmond doesn't seem to mention the George Darwin incident, concentrating on Mivart's publications and the machinations of Huxley's younger associates who were, obviously, trying to bend Darwinism in ideological directions even in that period.
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