-When Francis Galton wrote Hereditary Genius in 1869, he borrowed heavily from his cousin Charles Darwin's groundbreaking work on Natural Selection. One major departure from Darwin's work was that in addition to Darwin's natural selection he propagated an artificial selection of humans on the basis of who was qualified to reproduce. His work used a fairly complex and objective process to explain how the human race as a whole could be much improved by restricting certain types of people from reproducing, including the mentally handicapped, whole ethnic groups, and those of weak health. What most people took from his work was the natural "inferiority and savagery" of certain races. This and Galton's idea of artificial selection would go on to be applied in drastic ways by those less objective than him.

-After a five-year voyage and ecological study on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin returned to England and published his famous work On the Origin of the Species. It would change science forever by providing the basis for modern thought on the origin of the human race and evolution. Despite these invaluable and widely accepted theories his research also spawned a dangerous, radical, and now forgotten branch of science.