A Life of Sir Francis Galton by Nicholas Wright Gillham, Oxford, $35,
ISBN 0195143655
POOR Francis Galton. Forever in the shadow of his cousin, Charles Darwin, he
was eventually branded the 鈥渇ather of eugenics鈥�. But was he a victim of his
times, an upstanding Victorian boffin with views now rather out of fashion? Or
did he provide the intellectual underpinnings for much that went wrong in the
20th century?
Alas, Nicholas Wright Gillham may be very good on the detail of Galton鈥檚
intriguing life, but he is rather poor on analysing his impact. And at the end
of A Life of Sir Francis Galton, I remained uncertain whether I would have liked
the man or not.
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There is, of course, something magnificent about swashbuckling Victorian
polymaths. And Galton invented, discovered, quantified and meddled more than
most. After an indolent early adulthood, spending his inheritance philandering
across Europe, he was on the first white man鈥檚 expedition to northern Namibia,
where he distinguished himself by doing more measuring than killing, cuckolding
or converting. On his return he married and, from then on, seemed to be making
up for lost time.
Gillham helpfully divides Galton鈥檚 life into two parts. His cousin鈥檚 great
work, On the Origin of Species, forms the divide. Phase one was
geographical, dominated by African exploration and then meteorology. It led to a
lifelong involvement with the Royal Geographical Society when it was a power in
the British Empire鈥攁nd to pioneering efforts to use the telegraph, a new
technology, to map the weather in real time. During the course of this research
he discovered and named the anticyclone鈥攁nd even experimented with sound
(快猫短视频, 29 September, p 44).
Phase two was biological. After reading Darwin鈥檚 magnum opus, he became
obsessed with quantifying, and then manipulating, the essentials of life. In
effect, he launched the science of biometrics. He investigated fingerprints and
persuaded Scotland Yard to adopt his system for analysing them.
Many of his biometric efforts were none too successful, however. He failed to
find a way of measuring mental ability, to map good looks or to identify facial
traits that he imagined might typify criminals. But along the way, he invented
some key tools of modern statistics, including correlation and regression
analysis.
And, of course, his biometrics led him to what became his central concern in
later life: 鈥渉eredity and the possible improvement of the human race鈥�. He
invented the term 鈥渆ugenics鈥� and the neat phrase 鈥渘ature or nurture鈥�, as well as
the idea of studying identical twins to tease out their different roles. But he
was firmly on the side of nature as the source of our prime attributes鈥攐r
鈥減edigree鈥� as he called it.
A Life of Sir Francis Galton is well written, but Gillham seldom seems to go
to the heart of his subject. He never really analyses whether we should blame
Galton for the widespread sterilisation of supposed undesirables during the 20th
century鈥攁 policy that continued in the West up to the 1970s and persists
to this day in China鈥攐r the tyrannies of racial purists in Hitler鈥檚
Germany.
He asserts that Galton was mainly interested in encouraging procreation among
the 鈥渄esirable鈥� members of society, and 鈥渨ould have been horrified had he known
that within little more than 20 years of his death forcible sterilisation and
murder would be carried out in the name of eugenics鈥�. Yet he also quotes from
Galton鈥檚 unpublished novel, Kantsaywhere that describes a not-dissimilar society
that he clearly regarded as utopian.
Other authors would have made a central motif out of his failure to father
any children. A man who spent much time calculating that distinguished fathers
often begat distinguished sons (women didn鈥檛 come into it) could or would not
pursue the experiment in his own life.