As I wrote earlier today, the tendentious Angela Saini claimed, in a new Nature piece, that it was the humanities scholars at University College London (UCL) who got their school to finally see the odious nature of Galton's legacy (she's talking about eugenics; Francis Galton made many positive contributions to science). As Saini asseverated:
I've seen that it was not the university's biologists, but its humanities scholars - including curator Subhadra Das and historian Joe Cain - who forced their workplace to confront a sordid history that some geneticists had been willing to overlook.
And, as I said, since I used to spend a lot of time at UCL's Galton Lab, the facts about Galton's eugenic views and activities were not only recognized widely by the biology faculty, but publicly denigrated, and in many classes. It didn't take me long to find an example of such public denigration.
This is the first column of a review of Nicholas Wade's book A Troublesome Inheritance-a review by my UCL colleague, collaborator, author and public intellectual Dr. Steve Jones-that appeared in The Lancet in 2014. Steve is now "retired", though (unlike University of Chicago retired profs) he's still allowed to teach classes, and is doing so still. I can send you the whole review if you'd like to see it. Like me, Steve thought that Wade's book was pretty bad.
Remember, this is in The Lancet, a widely read medical journal, so Galton's racist views were being criticized outside of genetics.
Maybe if Saini had done her homework, she could have found this and similar examples, all of which refute her claim that UCL geneticists ignored the racist views of their 19th-century predecessor. It's either a lie, a distortion, or sheer ignorance to claim that geneticists at UCL have been "willing to overlook" Galton's bigotry. But of course Saini's piece is largely a tirade against scientists and their "non-objectivity" with the humanities cast as a white knight come to rescue science from its structural racism.
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