In his 1903 book Mankind in the Making, the British science-fiction novelist and social commentator Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) argued for a new type of political system in which society renounced any claim of absolute truths and people's ideas were based on presented facts – a system in which overall policy and public affairs in society were scientifically examined in the light of mathematical and statistical reasoning. Wells would go on to argue that

Wells, who was a biologist by training and one of the top science-fiction writers of the time, lived in the age of modern scientific utopias, marked by the rise of industrialization and workers’ struggles. However, what makes Wells’ contribution so relevant today is that he was standing up against Eugenics at a time when other intellectuals, including some fellow socialists, were siding with this racist pseudoscientific idea.

Wells was not opposed to a science of heredity, nevertheless he rejected the notion of Francis Galton (1822–1911), the father of modern statistics, that the state should intervene in order to breed human beings selectively. Positive traits such as beauty, health, capacity, and genius, as well as supposed negative traits such as criminality and alcoholism, says Wells, are in fact such complex entanglements of characteristics that ignorance and doubt bar our way. Still today at the Rijksmusem Boerhaave of science and medicine in Leiden, the Netherlands, the visitors can see some drawings of a facial angle, a geometrical system invented by the Dutch scientist Petrus Camper (1722–1789) and later used to justify slavery and racism.