Have a guess at who wrote this: “Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.”
Alfred Russel Wallace, is who. Usually billed as the man whom Darwin pipped at the post on natural selection, his life’s work ranged from biogeography to social reform.
He’s been much biographised recently, so editor Andrew Berry’s anthology of Wallace’s writings Infinite Tropics (Verso, £14) is a great way to savour his own words on hair, hazardous voyages, evolution and “robbery of the poor by the rich”. I was disturbed, though, to…
