LDUGC-095

This object was named by its intended purpose of tracking the weights of seeds across their generations (Head et al. 2019). It is a small, circular wooden block with seven concave indentations drilled into the surface. The indentations are roughly the same size, and each one has a letter associated to it, written with pencil directly on the wood: K, L, M, N, O, P, Q (Head et al. 2019). The details of how it was used come up in Galton’s Natural Inheritance (1889), wherein he describes an experiment conducted in 1875. He sent parental sweet pea seeds to seven of his friends; they were to plant the seeds (ten seeds of the same weight) and after these grew, the offspring seeds were to be harvested and sent back to Galton for examination (Galton, 1889). The 2019 report on the object proposed that Galton used this device to “store the seven samples of the distributed mother seeds” (Head et al. 2019, p.12).

The significance of this device lies in the fact that studying sweet pea seeds gave Galton what human subjects could not – the ability to study heredity over several generations. Galton was not a believer of environmental influences, but rather stressed genetic factors on human existence and society (Pickens, 1968). This leads back to his pursuit of understanding heredity from mathematics. Physical and mental attributes became quantifiable through measuring tools and tests, accumulating data for interpretation. For example, in the same year of the sweet pea experiment, Galton gathered information on the physiques of boys in town and country schools, wishing to discover if the physiques of town boys were deteriorating (Cowan, 1972). However, the challenge for Galton was that these school statistics could not yield data on the change of populations over several generations, which was crucial information he needed to reinforce eugenic ideals (Cowan, 1972). Thus, the sweet peas proved to be a good substitute. Moreover, the analysis of school and sweet pea data served as proof that heredity processes are probabilistic, meaning you can predict the outcome based on chance (Cowan, 1972). Ergo, inherited human traits can be predicted by calculating the possibility of them occurring.

That being so, after the results were publicised and popularised globally by Galton’s followers, the findings in heredity would be inevitably applied to humans. Eugenicists believed that people had stopped “breeding intelligently,” and that the only remedy was to correct the fertility of the community, differentiating between “good” and “bad” stocks (Galton, 1907, p.11). The results of experiments such as of the sweet peas led to the notion that social problems are caused by the genetic transmission of "undesirable" traits. It comes as no surprise then that the first policies affected would center around procreation, more specifically, sterilization. This is because eugenicists advocated for governments to implement intervention laws over the reproduction of its people, especially in the United States (Lombardo, 2018). By utilizing the knowledge of heredity, eugenic theories had a great amount of influence upon American social and political life, especially between 1900-1929, focusing mainly on “racial improvement” (Pickens, 1968, p.4).

During that period, many laws were passed that criminalised relations based on race, sexuality, and mental capability (Lombardo, 2018). Eugenic sterilization was enforced in thirty-two states by 1937 for reasons such as being “feebleminded”, “socially inadequate” or “defective”; what is more, those laws also incorporated the prohibition of interracial marriage, a vestige of colonialism supported by the contemporary biological and anthropological views of “race” (Lombardo, 2018). The message to the public was that without “the defective” people, the world will be a better and less burdened place. Consequently, by 1963 more than 60,000 individuals were sterilized across thirty-three states due to enforced legislation (Lombardo, 2000).