The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #123889 Message #2736613
Posted By: Keith A of Hertford
02-Oct-09 - 10:23 AM
Thread Name: BS: The BNP conundrum
Subject: RE: BS: The BNP conundrum
Coleman on the Galton Institute.
Four substantial demographic publications edited by me, with others, have appeared under its aegis, mostly published by Academic Press and Macmillan.
The pre-war British eugenics 'movement' was innocent of Continental excesses, although like many 'meritocratic' ideas it was afflicted by the simple-minded understanding of heredity at that time.
The Institute aims to promote knowledge of human heredity, discussion of its moral and ethical aspects and its consequences for human well-being. The academic distinction of its Council will be evident from a glance at its website http://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/.
Its President is Professor Steve Jones of UCL, one of the country's foremost geneticists. Most of the Galton Institute's research fund at present is spent on a big reproductive health project in Ethiopia.
The pressing need to help women in the poorest countries such as Ethiopia to avoid unwanted childbearing was emphasised very recently in the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development.
In the past it was associated with the pioneering efforts of Marie Stopes to help women avoid unwanted childbearing.
It attracted membership from across the political spectrum, including Arthur Balfour, Sir William Beveridge, Julian Huxley, R.A. Fisher, Bertrand Russell and other notables.
Among its Nobel Prize winning members included John Maynard Keynes, James Mead and Lord Rayleigh. Its Galton lectures have been delivered by such notables as J.D Bernal, A.H. Halsey, Josiah Stamp, Sidney Webb and Havelock Ellis.
It helped to 'invent' demography in Britain by funding the Population Investigation Committee at the LSE in 1936.
My own doctoral supervisor at the LSE, the eminent sociologist D.V.Glass, a prominent member, became the PIC's first Research Secretary in the 1930s.
One might suppose that a left-wing Jew would not have been inclined to associate with anything tainted.