The first eugenicist: was Francis Galton wrong to want to improve the human race?

• Author: Silber, Kenneth
• Position: Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton - Book Review

Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton, by Martin Brookes, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 298 pages, $24.95

FRANCIS GALTON (1822-1911) was a distinguished polymath who made major contributions to a variety of intellectual fields. He pioneered the scientific use of statistics, explored and mapped part of southern Africa, created the modern weather map, sent out the first psychological questionnaire, invented composite photography, and developed a workable system for identifying fingerprints. One might almost consider him an ideal human intellectual specimen--he certainly would have. But by now, all his accomplishments have been shadowed by his most notorious intellectual predilection: Galton was the founder of eugenics, the study of selective breeding for the purpose of improving the human race.

Galton's eugenics dreams were adopted with singular earnestness by others, most notoriously Nazi Germany. Less well remembered is the extent to which eugenics also became a significant factor in the policies of democratic nations such as the United States and Sweden. In the U.S., more than 60,000 people in 30 states received involuntary sterilizations under eugenics-based laws in the early and mid 20th century; they included the mentally ill or retarded, physically ill or disabled, and others deemed socially inadequate. Eugenics also gave new impetus to immigration restrictions, racial segregation, and bans on interracial marriage. Largely in reaction against eugenics, the social sciences have veered sharply from biological and hereditary explanations during the last half-century. Today Galton's specter rises again, as critics of biotechnology warn against a new era of eugenics it will supposedly enable.

Extreme Measures is an absorbing biography of Galton, giving a well-rounded picture of this brilliant yet disturbing man. Martin Brookes, a biologist and the author of Fly: The Unsung Hero of Twentieth-Century Science, ranges broadly across Galton's formidable accomplishments while taking an unflinching look at his eugenic ideas. Brookes writes in a wry, idiosyncratic manner appropriate to his eclectic and eccentric subject. (Galton's projects included counting brushstrokes while sitting for a portrait, devising abstruse formulas for making a cup of tea, and "cutting a round cake on scientific principles.")

Galton was born in Birmingham, England, to a family that prized intellectual achievement. His grandfathers were both members of the illustrious Lunar Society of scientists and industrialists; his maternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather. Galton was a precocious child, well versed in Homer at age 5. As a young man, he launched a...