The author, Martin Brookes, is a former evolutionary biologist who worked at University College London’s Galton Laboratory (which, before a sanitizing name change in 1965, was the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics). Yet today he is most often remembered for an achievement that puts him in a decidedly sinister light: he was the father of eugenics, the science, or pseudoscience, of “improving” the human race by selective breeding.Ī new biography, “Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton” (Bloomsbury $24.95), casts the man’s sinister aspect right in the title.
He discovered statistical rules that revolutionized the methodology of science. He pioneered the fields of weather forecasting and fingerprinting. Such research was entirely congenial to Francis Galton, a man who took as his motto “Whenever you can, count.” Galton was one of the great Victorian innovators. London proved the epicenter of beauty, Aberdeen of its opposite.
After many months of wielding his pricker and tallying the results, he drew a “beauty map” of the British Isles. By pricking holes in different parts of the paper, he could surreptitiously record his rating of a female passerby’s appearance, on a scale ranging from attractive to repellent. Concealed in the man’s pocket was a device he called a “pricker,” which consisted of a needle mounted on a thimble and a cross-shaped piece of paper. What they were seeing was not lechery in action but science. In the eighteen-eighties, residents of cities across Britain might have noticed an aged, bald, bewhiskered gentleman sedulously eying every girl he passed on the street while manipulating something in his pocket.
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