Professor Steve Jones: Has the Galton Institute Changed?

Richard Dawkins reviewed Professor Steve Jone's 'The Language of the Genes' as follows...

“I've enjoyed Steve Jones' recent book The Language of the Genes. He's a little bit too eager to bend over backwards to be politically respectable, because of the unsavory history of genetics, and he rather goes out of his way to disown those aspects of genetics that are politically disrespectable. I feel that that's over and done with now, and we can forget about it and get on, and I feel he's still a little bit unnecessarily eager to distance himself from the bad aspects of the history of genetics. But I have a lot of time for him; I greatly respect him.”

These two supporters of the British Humanist Assoication are mutual friends and admirers. Yet the President of the Galton Institute has, in the charity - that's right, its a registered charity - much of which to be ashamed in Galton's notorious membership. Yet, as one might suspect, the Galton Institute is not shy of its general ethos which is still, inherently, eugenic.

The Institute has overall control over and ultimate responsibility for the assets of the
Birth Control Trust (of the Galton Institute). This trust was established on 17 July
1978 to administer the assets of The Society for Constructive Birth Control Limited
which was liquidated at that time. The Trust deed provides that the income and assets of the Trust be applied in the provision of birth control for the relief of the poor.

This is from the 2004 Annual Report of the Galton Institute. Nice, eh? So kind of Professor Jones's society to be so concerned with providing 'birth control for the relief of the poor'...

Click here for the Institute's latest newsletter with such riveting pieces as 'Eugenics then and now' by David Galton (membership of this Institute appears hereditary!), an article on the British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference 2008, and Personality and IQ By Patrick James.