Talk:Emma Sophia Galton

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Women's History

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Doubts about whether she ever expressed doubts about eugenics

Gavan Tredoux (Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, with expertise on Galton) claims to have searched the cited archive and not found any such talk between the siblings: https://twitter.com/gtredoux/status/1571320004791918595 He also states "I am not going to bother having wikipedia corrected. The longer it stands, the more ridiculous the thing looks in the eyes of posterity." https://twitter.com/gtredoux/status/1571320010106195971 208.59.185.238 (talk) 03:22, 20 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's the Wellcome Trust that Tredoux needs to criticise - we can only go by what the sources say and the Trust should be a reliable source on its own library. If they are mistaken they should acknowledge that. JezGrove (talk) 14:02, 20 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Where does the Wellcome Trust say anything like that, exactly? As you added all that material including quotes, one would hope you would remember where, exactly, they said all that stuff, rather than citing literally 159 boxes of documents as your source. --Gwern (contribs) 16:00 20 September 2022 (GMT)

I think the Wellcome Foundation's website has changed since I cited it; I really don't believe that my editing is so sloppy that I would have given such a vague reference. And I obviously wouldn't invent the quoted extract of the letter and it didn't come out of thin air.

Sadly, I don't have the £4,039.20 (or even the reduced price of £4,016.76 with a Bibliophiles Club Membership!) so I can't buy this book. However, the sale website cites Clauser, 'The life and labors of Francis Galton,' Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, vol. 32 (2007), pp. 440-444 and Stigler, 'Francis Galton's Account of the Invention of Correlation,' Statistical Science, vol. 4 (1989), pp. 73-79.

The attribution isn't very clear (I think the following is from Stigler) but anyway either he or Clauser writes:

Even his sister Emma was troubled by his views. But he dismissed her scruples, writing to her that 'It is one of the few services that a man situated like myself can do, to take up an unpopular side when he knows it to be the true one'. Though he and Darwin did not see eye to eye on every matter, Galton was devastated by Darwin's death in 1882, writing to Emma, 'I owed more to him than to any man living ... The world seems so blank to me now Darwin is gone.'

This probably doesn't help much, but if the correspondence isn't in the Wellcome Library it must presumably be in another archive? JezGrove (talk) 19:25, 20 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That doesn't help at all, because neither the Stigler paper nor the Clauser book review contain a mention of Emma, much less excerpts (as you can verify in a few seconds in Google Scholar & Libgen). And searching all of the sentences/quotes from that block turn up nothing but the rare-books seller and echoes of it like your edit; this is strange given that they are claiming to sell something that is public domain & would have been digitized ages ago, and all of these would be in Google Books, among other places, if they contained the quotes. (Gillham, in fact, quotes Galton on the death of Darwin... but gives an entirely different quote.)

Checking Wellcome again in IA to see what happened, it seems what happened is that their long 'codebreakers' entry has been thoroughly scrubbed from the Internet (along with the rest of 'Codebreakers', apparently, oddly), and it is the source of the blockquote which the rarebook seller has plagiarized without attribution. (I'm very surprised there seem to be no indexed mirrors of 'Codebreakers' which would have provided additional search engine hits, rather than a single unique hit smelling like fabrication, but, well, sometimes that happens and stuff just linkrots.) You then copied the citation they gave for it without providing the specific letter or context, and eventually 'Codebreakers' got deleted by Wellcome. Fortunately, the scanned letters still exist outside the IA snapshot on the Wellcome website.

Examining the Wellcome scans is... hard. (I know my cursive skills are extremely weak, but still, these letters seem abominably difficult to read.) As far as I can tell, the two quotes seem to be real: the Darwin-blank one is the fourth 1882 letter Galton-to-Emma, page 26 of the PDF, albeit heavily cut down. The Emma-services one then appears to be the fifth 1883 Galton-to-Emma letter, page 35 of the PDF (starting pg32); this quote also seems to be accurate but possibly mischaracterized.

Emma's letter is not preserved, only Galton's reply, and while I can't read most of his letter, some parts sound as if he is worried for his personal safety, alluding to how heretics were burned not long ago. Since Emma's views are not quoted, I am left doubtful of the editorializing about Emma being troubled by his views, which looks like it's just being read into it; she could just as easily have been worried about repercussions, personal or professional, in the backlash, that sort of thing. (I noticed in an earlier letter that his sisters apparently also reproached him for publishing his research on the inefficacy of prayer, making the Noble Lie argument that regardless of the truth, he shouldn't publish it. So they may just have been rather conventional-minded.) It would be useful if someone who can read Galton's chicken-scratch script could transcribe that letter. If there is no clear statement by Galton of what Emma actually wrote, then the Wellcome author was just editorializing and the quote shouldn't be in her article but his, if at all (and likewise the Darwin one - possibly relevant to his article, sure, but not hers). --Gwern (contribs) 20:29 20 September 2022 (GMT)