Extreme Measures

The Victorian polymath Francis Galton: Medic, mathematician, statistician, gentleman adventurer, inventor of eugenics and promoter of the use of fingerprints, has been cropping up frequently in my reading. He laid the foundations for my debunking of Derren Brown's cringe-worthy Lotto scam by the development of The Wisdom of Crowds, and he was first to notice the statistical phenomenon of regression towards the mean which was documented by Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard's Walk.

This led me to Martin Brookes 'Extreme Measures' – a fast-paced biography of Galton. Brookes' biography. The book, as tradition seems to dictate, is penned in chronological order. Perhaps it lingers too long on Galton's father and grandfather, although this does provide the back-story to Galton's inherited wealth, which meant in his twenties he became a gentleman of leisure, able to pursue whatever vocation he desired. In reality this led to an unstructured, meandering life where ideas were rigorously pursued for a period before he tired of them and moved to something else. To wrap some context to this lifestyle, this was the age where being a polymath was still possible; many areas of science were poorly developed or in their infancy and by that fact it took little effort to become an expert, particularly if one was endowed with practically limitless wealth and prodigious available time.

Having inherited his fortune, Galton embarked upon the task of mapping what is now called Namibia. He was employed primarily in the charting of the landscape which appealed to his analytical and methodical mind, but in addition he acted as an unofficial mediator and peace-keeper between the rival indigenous tribes including the Khoikhoi and the Damara. The expedition was well documented in Galton's journals and has subsequently appeared on the website devoted to him at galton.org. The expedition occupies the most lively chapters of Brookes' work – Galton's travels were far from incident free and bedevilled with poor decision-making and the causal effect of losing livestock to lion attacks.

After his travelling bug had been quashed, Galton turned his attention to eugenics, and has been widely credited with its birth. As a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton was fascinated with the concept of natural selection after reading Origin of Species. He believed that many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, and therefore those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest. He documented these opinions in a series of publications and became a proponent of selected mating of humans to ensure that only the best tradesmen in every field of mankind was allowed to procreate, thus that would mean only the best genes (yet to be discovered at that time) would be passed down to the following generation. Galton was an inveterate intellectual snob, and a misogynist to boot; his theories had no room for anyone he considered not of merit (yet his own definitions of worth were contradictory and subjective at best), and womankind was not afforded any space in this dogma, so it remains unclear exactly how the matings would occur. Of course eugenics has long since been discredited after being adopted by the Nazis and it is difficult now to see how any society would tolerate such state intervention.

Galton possessed many personality flaws and his feuds with Dr Henry Faulds over the invention of fingerprints as a method to combat crime were beneath such an intellect. Despite it being clear that Brookes is a disciple of Galton's, he doesn't shy away from documenting these run-ins and it becomes evident that in many respects Galton was a difficult man to like. For all his manifest shortcomings, he led a full and noteworthy life with a sizeable contribution to society. On that basis, this book presents a warts 'n' all account and is a fascinating read as a consequence.