A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics

Product Description

Few scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as Francis Galton. He was an important African explorer, travel writer, and geographer. He was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. Now, Nicholas Gillham paints an engaging portrait of this Victorian polymath.
The book traces Galton’s ancestry (he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and the cousin of Charles Darwin), upbringing, training as a medical apprentice, and experience as a Cambridge undergraduate. It recounts in colorful detail Galton’s adventures as leader of his own expedition in Namibia. Darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in Galton’s life was the publication of the
Origin of Species. Thereafter, Galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis and twin studies to argue that talent and character were inherited and that humans could be selectively bred to enhance these qualities. To this end, he founded the eugenics movement which rapidly gained momentum early in the last century. After Galton’s death, however, eugenics took a more sinister path, as in the United States, where by 1913 sixteen states had involuntary sterilization laws, and in Germany, where the goal of racial purity was pushed to its horrific limit in the “final solution.” Galton himself, Gillham writes, would have been appalled by the extremes to which eugenics was carried.
Here then is a vibrant biography of a remarkable scientist as well as a superb portrait of science in the Victorian era.

From Publishers Weekly

This may well prove to be the definitive biography of the British explorer, a cousin and contemporary of Charles Darwin. Gillham, emeritus professor of biology at Duke University, offers an elegant and complete portrait comparable to Janet Browne’s acclaimed life of Darwin. Galton is best known as the founder of eugenics, but his interests and subsequent contributions as Victorian traveler and scientist were myriad. Like Darwin, he set out to become a doctor but his curiosity led him further afield in Galton’s case, to Africa. He won fame for his expedition in Nambia and his subsequent book of observations, and became an accomplished geographer and meteorologist credited with discovering the anticyclone. Greatly influenced in later life by the Origin of Species, Galton committed himself to the study of human heredity, leading, for example, to his use of fingerprinting, an innovation adopted by Scotland Yard, and the development of important statistical tools. His work unraveling the heritability of what he called “talent and character” predated the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s principals and the use of IQ tests. Galton relied on pedigree analysis, twin studies and biometrics to measure the favorable physical characteristics that he theorized evidenced mental superiority. Gillham sheds light on the confluence of Victorian social theory and science brought on by the Darwinian revolution. From this confluence emerged the utopian eugenics movement, which by 1913 had spawned involuntary sterilization laws in 16 of the United States and set the stage for Nazi Germany’s atrocities in the name of racial purity. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

Between 1914 and 1930, Karl Pearson devoted four volumes to a biography of his mentor, Francis Galton (Figure). The result was an unwieldy and deferential look at the man known as the father of eugenics. Duke University geneticist Nicholas Wright Gillham has set out to remedy Pearson’s shortcomings, arguing that a new biography of the British polymath is warranted in the light of the “eugenic considerations” raised by “rapid advances in modern human genetics.” Gillham begins by remi