How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy

In 1904, Nature printed a speech about eugenics by the statistician Francis Galton. One of the foremost scientists of his day, Galton defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities of a race”. He said that “the aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens, causing them to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation”.

Galton’s scientifically inaccurate ideas about eugenics had a huge, damaging influence that the world is still grappling with. The idea that some groups — people of colour or poor people, for example — were inferior has fuelled irreparable discrimination and racism. Nature published several papers by Galton and other eugenicists, thus giving a platform to these views. At the time, eugenics “was an active area of research and considered a very legitimate one”, says Melinda Baldwin, a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, who wrote Making Nature, a 2015 history of the journal. Nature, she says, “helped to spread eugenic doctrine by publishing those...