naval eugenics

[PMarione]

In 1819, Charles Benedict Davenport, Director of of the Department of Experimental Evolution and of the Eugenics Record Office at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, published an curious book : Naval Officers, their heredity and development now available on this very website
http://www.ageofnelson.org/pdf/naval_officers_heredity.pdf

The first part is worth a read and a good laugh.
The idea was to try to "accurately and quickly" identify the characteristics that make great naval officers. These qualities are of genetic origin. So to breed great officers, all you have to do is to check there genealogy.

Then comes the essential classification : "hyperkinetic", "hypokinetic" and "intermediaries".
Cochrane and Nelson were clearly hyperkinetics while Collingwood was an hypokinetic, and Marryat an intermediary.

Another interesting concept was the "thalassophilia".

A shame that Nelson only had a daughter who gave birth to a line of men of the Church.

[Redfish]

Are you sure it was not 1919? I don't think there was such a thing as a department of experimental evolution round 1819

Dani

[PMarione]

You are right.
The bad habit of always typing 17 or 18.

I am not sure that the very idea of "eugenics" already existed before Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and Francis Galton in the 1880's.
Before that I suppose that God was the answer to the question.

Mahan wrote a "Types of Naval Officers" in 1901.

Wilson's "Sociobiology" still has it's adepts.

[PMarione]

Here is Mahan's book's review in the NY Times