Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The ink used to print the Origin of Species was hardly dry before some began to consider how human beings could evolve on purpose. For no one is that more true than Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Fascinated by Darwin’s views on artificial selection, he soon published his highly influential book Hereditary Genius and in doing so created the groundwork for the first major attempt to deliberately impact human evolution – the field of Eugenics.
In this talk, I will explain the key but largely unknown scientific error made by Galton and how profoundly it has distorted our world to the present day. Finding a better way forward turns on the issue of the role of the individual, which when solved gives us entirely new ways of learning about how to evolve on purpose.
#eugenics #learning #evolution #biology #darwin
The ink used to print the Origin of Species was hardly dry before some began to consider how human beings could evolve on purpose. For no one is that more true than Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Fascinated by Darwin’s views on artificial selection, he soon published his highly influential book Hereditary Genius and in doing so created the groundwork for the first major attempt to deliberately impact human evolution – the field of Eugenics.
In this talk, I will explain the key but largely unknown scientific error made by Galton and how profoundly it has distorted our world to the present day. Finding a better way forward turns on the issue of the role of the individual, which when solved gives us entirely new ways of learning about how to evolve on purpose.
#eugenics #learning #evolution #biology #darwin
