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Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton
"Count wherever you can" was the motto of Sir Francis Galton's extraordinary life. His measuring mind left its mark all over the scientific landscape. Explorer, inventor, meteorologist, psychologist, anthropologist, and statistician, Galton was one of the great Victorian polymaths. And his obsessive quest for knowledge extended far beyond conventional fields of learning. He turned tea-making into a theoretical science, counted the brush strokes on his portrait, and created a beauty map of the British Isles, ranking its cities on the basis of their feminine allure. But it was in the fledgling field of genetics that he made his most indelible impression. Galton kick-started the enduring nature/nurture debate and took hereditary determinism to its darkest extreme, dreaming of a future society built on a race of pure-breeding supermen.
Through this colorful biography, Martin Brookes examines Galton's scientific legacy and takes us on a fascinating journey to the origins of modern human genetics.
Through this colorful biography, Martin Brookes examines Galton's scientific legacy and takes us on a fascinating journey to the origins of modern human genetics.
301 pages, Hardcover
First published July 19, 2004
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September 14, 2015
Imagine The Beatles on the left hand side, Hitler on the right hand side, and Francis Galton in the middle. Yes, that will need a little explanation. When Georgia (my daughter) was little she watched Wizard of Oz and Yellow Submarine obsessively and in the latter psychedelical cartoon there is a character called Jeremy
who I now realise must have been modelled on Francis Galton. He talks like this
Ad hoc, ad lock and quid pro quo…so little time, so much to know! Eminent physicist, polyglot, catalyst, prizewinning botanist, hardwriting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist, too! Turboprop super combustible spring! Metrocyclonic and stereophonic! This motor, I see, has a broken down…thing! Logsign clocksign, big thingamabob…let’s see, chewing gum will do the job!
Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, invented eugenics – that’s where Hitler comes in. He was one of those Victorian gentleman scientists who investigated what he damn well pleased, so his career would give a housefly lessons in zigzagging.
In the early 1860s he was investigating problems of mapping Africa, which he had recently explored, naturally, when he zagged off to discover the formula for the perfect cup of tea
C + ne = (C+n) t
C= n (e-t)/(t-1)
(Martin Brookes comments : impossible to understand his tea-brewing theory); then calculated how much gold there was in the whole world and if it would fit inside his house (he concluded he would only need his dining room); then investigated some meteorology problem and named the anti-cyclone which before then hadn’t been noticed. He was a whirligig of science!
When his cousin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he became an instant convert and he began to think ”if farmers could use artificial selection to exaggerate desirable features in animals and plants, then why could not society do the same to the minds and bodies of men?” So he began to investigate if talent or intelligence was hereditary. There was no previous published information on this, nothing, but FG liked it like that, he usually didn’t bother researching what other people thought about a topic, he just thought hard and plunged ahead on his own. Those were the days. ( It may be worth remembering that, for instance, a lot of people really did believe that some event which happened to the mother during pregnancy would have a direct effect on the child, as in Joseph Merrick’s account of his mother being knocked over by a circus elephant leading to his own extreme disfigurement.)
He published his first big article on what he later (in 1883) named as eugenics in 1864 and he anticipated certain criticisms, but perhaps not the ones you may have thought of yourself :
Galton’s aim was clear – the improvement of mental ability through selective breeding … There was, it seems, a popular belief at the time that what eminent men had in intellect, they lacked in sexual prowess and physical strength…selecting for [mental] ability might lead to the creation of a race of brainy, asexual weaklings. [Concerning this Galton wrote] “I, however, find that very great men are certainly not averse to the other sex, for some such have been noted for their illicit intercourses”
So that would not be a problem. Since he was contemplating the general improvement of the whole human race he had to assess the strengths and weaknesses of other races.
On Africans :
The Negro has strong impulsive passions… He is warmhearted, loving towards his Master’s children, and idolised by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-toming or dancing.
On Americans :
enterprising, defiant and touchy; impatient of authority; furious politicians; very tolerant of fraud and violence; possessing much high and generous spirit, and some true religious feeling, but strongly addicted to cant.
Brookes comments : For someone apparently so devoted to the discovery of natural truths, Galton was surprisingly quick to abandon his scientific methods when it came to the issue of race. I would just like to have amended the word surprisingly in that sentence to unsurprisingly.
In 1869 he published his first big eugenics book Hereditary Genius. The reviews were modestly appreciative but inclined to apply cold water :
Unfortunately, young men will fall in love, and girls will marry them without considering the effect of the union upon the race.
Galton needed some proof to back up his notions about human heredity but there was no information. So he decided to get the raw data he needed himself. In so doing, he helped considerably to found the discipline of sociological statistics. In one amusing example, he showed that the life expectancy of clergymen was slightly less than that of doctors, which led him to publish an article called Statistical Enquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer. This generated a great controversy, during which he pointed out robustly that most churches were fitted with lightning rods.
By 1873 his eugenic theories were coming together. They now began to sound like Heinrich Himmler. In Galton’s future society, regional eugenics offices would assess everyone’s fitness to breed. He thought these superior types would voluntarily coalesce into a tightly-knit social unit separate from mainstream society. But this social unit might become the target of hostility – Galton therefore suggested : let them take ship and emigrate and become the parents of a new state, with a glorious future.
Brookes describes the fate of the others :
the reproductive undesirables would be expected to repress their most basic instincts. Ominous consequences awaited those who failed to confirm to a celibate life. Anyone found guilty of illicit procreation would be considered “enemies to the state, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness”
Whatever that meant. He died in 1911. If he’d have lived another 30 years he’d have found out exactly what it would mean to forfeit all claims to kindness from the state. Galton was aware that his theories were entirely anti-democratic. He stated that democracy: demands equal consideration for the feelings of all, just in the same way as their rights are equally maintained by law. But it goes farther than this, for it asserts that men are of equal value as social units, equally capable of voting, and the rest. This feeling is undeniably wrong and cannot last.
We automatically think “Victorian fascist!” when we read such stuff, but who has never been tempted into Galtonian thinking?
Needing yet more data to back up this lunatic stuff, he zagged off into investigating criminology and pioneering experimental psychology. He invented word-association tests way before Freud, and he wrote the first book on the science of fingerprinting, and thus proved to the previously doubting top cops at Scotland Yard that this was the best way of identifying criminals. Then back to zoology. For some crackbrained reason he wanted to find out which of the various animals at London Zoo could hear high pitched sounds.
So :
I contrived a hollow cane made like a walking stick, having a removable whistle at its lower end, with an exposed indiarubber tube under its curved handle. Whenever I squeezed the tube against the handle, air was pushed through the whistle. I tried it at nearly all the cages in the Zoological Gardens, but with little result of interest, except that it certainly annoyed some of the lions.
"Stop that right now!"
Then, he began to think about what we would now call body language. He decided he needed another piece of apparatus to find out exactly how much people were interested in each other at a dinner table. He thought about inserting a pressure gauge in the legs of the chairs of the guests to measure how much they “inclined” their chairs towards each other, but gave it up as not practical. He did a lot of foreign travel, and decided to classify the pulchritude of the female population in the different European cities he visited. There were six size categories, ranging from “thin” to “prize fat”. Nothing about people was too trivial for him to want to document and measure. He tried to calibrate boredom by counting how often different types of people in an audience fidget during a performance. Apart from being a proto-Nazi, Galton was hilarious.
The eugenics theories, after a rocky start, became popular from the 1890s onwards.
George Bernard Shaw :
What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see each other again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.
(It sounds like he is talking about Saturday night in Nottingham.)
Eugenics lost a lot of its allure after Hitler and Himmler, but its ideas tend to slide in through the back door quite easily. These days it is through genetics. Who can forget, Martin Brookes asks, the infamous Daily Mail headline :
ABORTION HOPE AFTER “GAY GENE” FINDINGS
So – this is a great little biography of a fascinating character. This review is long enough, I think, but still I didn’t tell you the half of it.
who I now realise must have been modelled on Francis Galton. He talks like this
Ad hoc, ad lock and quid pro quo…so little time, so much to know! Eminent physicist, polyglot, catalyst, prizewinning botanist, hardwriting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist, too! Turboprop super combustible spring! Metrocyclonic and stereophonic! This motor, I see, has a broken down…thing! Logsign clocksign, big thingamabob…let’s see, chewing gum will do the job!
Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, invented eugenics – that’s where Hitler comes in. He was one of those Victorian gentleman scientists who investigated what he damn well pleased, so his career would give a housefly lessons in zigzagging.
In the early 1860s he was investigating problems of mapping Africa, which he had recently explored, naturally, when he zagged off to discover the formula for the perfect cup of tea
C + ne = (C+n) t
C= n (e-t)/(t-1)
(Martin Brookes comments : impossible to understand his tea-brewing theory); then calculated how much gold there was in the whole world and if it would fit inside his house (he concluded he would only need his dining room); then investigated some meteorology problem and named the anti-cyclone which before then hadn’t been noticed. He was a whirligig of science!
When his cousin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he became an instant convert and he began to think ”if farmers could use artificial selection to exaggerate desirable features in animals and plants, then why could not society do the same to the minds and bodies of men?” So he began to investigate if talent or intelligence was hereditary. There was no previous published information on this, nothing, but FG liked it like that, he usually didn’t bother researching what other people thought about a topic, he just thought hard and plunged ahead on his own. Those were the days. ( It may be worth remembering that, for instance, a lot of people really did believe that some event which happened to the mother during pregnancy would have a direct effect on the child, as in Joseph Merrick’s account of his mother being knocked over by a circus elephant leading to his own extreme disfigurement.)
He published his first big article on what he later (in 1883) named as eugenics in 1864 and he anticipated certain criticisms, but perhaps not the ones you may have thought of yourself :
Galton’s aim was clear – the improvement of mental ability through selective breeding … There was, it seems, a popular belief at the time that what eminent men had in intellect, they lacked in sexual prowess and physical strength…selecting for [mental] ability might lead to the creation of a race of brainy, asexual weaklings. [Concerning this Galton wrote] “I, however, find that very great men are certainly not averse to the other sex, for some such have been noted for their illicit intercourses”
So that would not be a problem. Since he was contemplating the general improvement of the whole human race he had to assess the strengths and weaknesses of other races.
On Africans :
The Negro has strong impulsive passions… He is warmhearted, loving towards his Master’s children, and idolised by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-toming or dancing.
On Americans :
enterprising, defiant and touchy; impatient of authority; furious politicians; very tolerant of fraud and violence; possessing much high and generous spirit, and some true religious feeling, but strongly addicted to cant.
Brookes comments : For someone apparently so devoted to the discovery of natural truths, Galton was surprisingly quick to abandon his scientific methods when it came to the issue of race. I would just like to have amended the word surprisingly in that sentence to unsurprisingly.
In 1869 he published his first big eugenics book Hereditary Genius. The reviews were modestly appreciative but inclined to apply cold water :
Unfortunately, young men will fall in love, and girls will marry them without considering the effect of the union upon the race.
Galton needed some proof to back up his notions about human heredity but there was no information. So he decided to get the raw data he needed himself. In so doing, he helped considerably to found the discipline of sociological statistics. In one amusing example, he showed that the life expectancy of clergymen was slightly less than that of doctors, which led him to publish an article called Statistical Enquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer. This generated a great controversy, during which he pointed out robustly that most churches were fitted with lightning rods.
By 1873 his eugenic theories were coming together. They now began to sound like Heinrich Himmler. In Galton’s future society, regional eugenics offices would assess everyone’s fitness to breed. He thought these superior types would voluntarily coalesce into a tightly-knit social unit separate from mainstream society. But this social unit might become the target of hostility – Galton therefore suggested : let them take ship and emigrate and become the parents of a new state, with a glorious future.
Brookes describes the fate of the others :
the reproductive undesirables would be expected to repress their most basic instincts. Ominous consequences awaited those who failed to confirm to a celibate life. Anyone found guilty of illicit procreation would be considered “enemies to the state, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness”
Whatever that meant. He died in 1911. If he’d have lived another 30 years he’d have found out exactly what it would mean to forfeit all claims to kindness from the state. Galton was aware that his theories were entirely anti-democratic. He stated that democracy: demands equal consideration for the feelings of all, just in the same way as their rights are equally maintained by law. But it goes farther than this, for it asserts that men are of equal value as social units, equally capable of voting, and the rest. This feeling is undeniably wrong and cannot last.
We automatically think “Victorian fascist!” when we read such stuff, but who has never been tempted into Galtonian thinking?
Needing yet more data to back up this lunatic stuff, he zagged off into investigating criminology and pioneering experimental psychology. He invented word-association tests way before Freud, and he wrote the first book on the science of fingerprinting, and thus proved to the previously doubting top cops at Scotland Yard that this was the best way of identifying criminals. Then back to zoology. For some crackbrained reason he wanted to find out which of the various animals at London Zoo could hear high pitched sounds.
So :
I contrived a hollow cane made like a walking stick, having a removable whistle at its lower end, with an exposed indiarubber tube under its curved handle. Whenever I squeezed the tube against the handle, air was pushed through the whistle. I tried it at nearly all the cages in the Zoological Gardens, but with little result of interest, except that it certainly annoyed some of the lions.
"Stop that right now!"
Then, he began to think about what we would now call body language. He decided he needed another piece of apparatus to find out exactly how much people were interested in each other at a dinner table. He thought about inserting a pressure gauge in the legs of the chairs of the guests to measure how much they “inclined” their chairs towards each other, but gave it up as not practical. He did a lot of foreign travel, and decided to classify the pulchritude of the female population in the different European cities he visited. There were six size categories, ranging from “thin” to “prize fat”. Nothing about people was too trivial for him to want to document and measure. He tried to calibrate boredom by counting how often different types of people in an audience fidget during a performance. Apart from being a proto-Nazi, Galton was hilarious.
The eugenics theories, after a rocky start, became popular from the 1890s onwards.
George Bernard Shaw :
What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see each other again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.
(It sounds like he is talking about Saturday night in Nottingham.)
Eugenics lost a lot of its allure after Hitler and Himmler, but its ideas tend to slide in through the back door quite easily. These days it is through genetics. Who can forget, Martin Brookes asks, the infamous Daily Mail headline :
ABORTION HOPE AFTER “GAY GENE” FINDINGS
So – this is a great little biography of a fascinating character. This review is long enough, I think, but still I didn’t tell you the half of it.
July 6, 2020
I picked this book up because I am a biometrician- My work is at the intersection of statistics, biology, and public policy. Galton is, in many ways, one of the founding fathers of this kind of work. He is also the father of modern racism. In 2020, it's time for all of us- scientists and statisticians included- to be recognizing the racist roots of our lives and work.
So that's how I came here.
This biography is fine for tracking his life and publications, but does not put his work into a modern context. The author avoids real discussion of the impacts Galton has had on modern science. That would be because, other than some developing an important statistical technique, Galton was not a good scientist. He used his family credentials to justify his personal bias, which gave a faulty scientific veneer to racism.
I don't know if you've seen the news lately, but we're still dealing with the fallout from Galton's ego. This hagiography would have you think that he was a relatively harmless, quirky, woman-hating old man puttering around with his numbers. And while I don't think Galton is single-handedly responsible for the Holocaust or the current state of racism, we owe it to ourselves and our generation of biologists to acknowledge our foul, rotten roots.
A minor note, but I was absolutely shocked in the the epilogue, where the author uses The Bell Curve as an example of how Galton's ideas are still in valid scientific discussion and that criticisms fall on party lines. The Bell Curve has been roundly debunked by every respectable evolutionary scientist (the entire thing is based on an erroneous interpretation of heredity, which is brushed on in the body of Extreme Measures). The only ones still debating the value of that book are racists with no scientific background. Brooks has a degree in evolutionary biology, he should know better. Shame. Shame. Shame.
So that's how I came here.
This biography is fine for tracking his life and publications, but does not put his work into a modern context. The author avoids real discussion of the impacts Galton has had on modern science. That would be because, other than some developing an important statistical technique, Galton was not a good scientist. He used his family credentials to justify his personal bias, which gave a faulty scientific veneer to racism.
I don't know if you've seen the news lately, but we're still dealing with the fallout from Galton's ego. This hagiography would have you think that he was a relatively harmless, quirky, woman-hating old man puttering around with his numbers. And while I don't think Galton is single-handedly responsible for the Holocaust or the current state of racism, we owe it to ourselves and our generation of biologists to acknowledge our foul, rotten roots.
A minor note, but I was absolutely shocked in the the epilogue, where the author uses The Bell Curve as an example of how Galton's ideas are still in valid scientific discussion and that criticisms fall on party lines. The Bell Curve has been roundly debunked by every respectable evolutionary scientist (the entire thing is based on an erroneous interpretation of heredity, which is brushed on in the body of Extreme Measures). The only ones still debating the value of that book are racists with no scientific background. Brooks has a degree in evolutionary biology, he should know better. Shame. Shame. Shame.
April 2, 2021
This is a fantastic book on Sir Francis Galton. You will finish the book feeling like you have learned a lot about the man, his life and scientific achievements. I will list a few things about him that are generally not known. F. Galton explored Africa for two years, his book "The Art of Travel" is the first survival guide ever written (pg 116). In 1855 it was he who recommended survival training in the wild to The British Army. He would become the first lecturer on the topic (pg 118) Today, it is basic that everyone in the military receive training on survival in the wild. F. Galton would play a key part in recommending Geography be taught in public school (pg 122). The author refers to F. Galton as a "born again Darwinian" after reading "On the Origin of Species" (pg 145). The book has also heavily influenced Richard Dawkins. I am going to have to read this book in the near future. F. Galton would say he owed much of his scientific impulses to Darwin (pg 236). Here is something interesting, The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1868 had admission exams (pg 161) Today, there are many people such as Jordan Peterson, that consider entrance exams, nothing more than I.Q. tests. Contrary to what many believe about F. Galton, it was not the Anglo-Saxons of his day, but the Ancient Greeks, around 500 B.C. called the Athenians who were superior to all others. Socrates and Phidias were at the top of eminence. (pg 164). In his last years, F. Galton would write a fictional book "Kantsaywhere" In a society where you had to pass two exams in order to live a life of success and happiness. If you failed an exam you were sent to work in labour camps. F. Galton was not successful in getting the book published and only a random number of pages survived (pg 289 - 290). I found it funny when I read this because I have seen commercials and trailers about movies and TV shows with very similar stories and to think F. Galton thought of it first. "The Thinning" is one of the movies, but I have not seen it. If ever in London you can visit F. Galton's home at 42 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1BN, United Kingdom.
July 12, 2018
An absolutely fascinating account of a brilliant, and strange, character named Francis Galton--a Victorian gentleman and cousin of Charles Darwin. He was, terrifyingly, the father of eugenics, but he also made some significant and valid contributions to various different scientific disciplines--including statistics and psychology. He had some very peculiar tendencies--he was obsessed with measurements, for instance. He was an intrepid explorer in Africa in his youth. He makes me think of that old saying about how there is a thin line between genius and lunacy. He was an inventor---and many of his inventions were hilarious--my fav was his "gumption reviver"--a device which would pour water on his head to keep him awake while studying. He also devised a completely mathematically encoded language by which he felt we could communicate with Martians, if in fact they did exist---and oh my, his take on what he predicted Martians would be like had me laughing out loud. Definitely gives some insights on how scientific minds can work. So worth reading.
August 13, 2025
Lots to like in this charming man and his time biography. Very good on his personal psychology and drives, but could have hit better on the limitations of his science. I have a theory of why normal distributions didnt work well for his hereditary investigations, but were there other areas where he succeeded with it? I would love more on the interface between the math and his errors — for example, we dont get a sense of how good his early weather predictions were, and to what extent that was due to modeling errors.
Author paints a picture of an engineer who wishes he was a scientist, the ultimate steam punk imperial victorian anti hero. The guy a James Scott would see as the ultimate technocratic supervillain.
But more precision beyond the psychology (hard in a short volume ofc) would have been great — maybe cut the author as protagonist stuff in the intro!
Author paints a picture of an engineer who wishes he was a scientist, the ultimate steam punk imperial victorian anti hero. The guy a James Scott would see as the ultimate technocratic supervillain.
But more precision beyond the psychology (hard in a short volume ofc) would have been great — maybe cut the author as protagonist stuff in the intro!
August 5, 2022
Francis Galton was a scientist and explorer in a golden age of discovery. He was also the father of the discredited science of eugenics and a bigot. This biography manages to look at his achievements as a man on the cutting edge of human advancement and at his failings as a human being. It doesn’t gloss over his racist and sexist views which coloured his opinions on how human advancement should be best managed, nor is it a hatchet job upon his scientific knowledge and discoveries. His arrogance and prejudices are revealed along with his understanding of how the world works. A well balanced book that could have easily carried its own biased agenda.
May 17, 2020
Mostly a biographical sketch of his travels but less obvious as to how his experiences influenced his experiments.
April 29, 2021
Entertaining and informative throughout
June 22, 2025
Little bro wants David Grann but doesn’t have David Grann money… Martin Brookes it is then chief
August 19, 2011
Have you ever heard about a guy named Francis Galton? I hadn't either until I found this book at a local second-hand sale and decided that learning about an essentially unknown man could be fun. Francis Galton was a scientist in 19th century Victorian England who contributed passionately and sporatically to multiple fields of science. He was one of the last great polymoths who invented one of the first speedometers, established standards of detail in geography and exploration, lead to the introduction of finger printing as a means of criminal identification, invented a map for air pressure and wrote countless other papers, books and experiments that lead to huge leaps in the scientific understandings of the time. His largest contribution, however, and his life work, was in the field of eugenics of which he coined the term. Galton wanted to great a utopian world in which the inferior were eventually bred out to leave room for the growth of the superior man and ultimately the nation and the world. With his ideals and radical theories, Galton stirred the scientific world in the 1860s into a heated debate of nature vs nurture that still rages today. While his first attempts at national eugenics failed, in the early 20th century his ideas began to catch on and the eugenics movement spread internationally. For a man that no one remembers, he certainly made his mark on world history.
Extreme Measures is a biography of Galton's life starting in early childhood and ending at his quiet death. It reads in an easy to follow chronological order as opposed to a stream of facts and figures characteristic of Galton's own works. I'd compare the text best to books like That Book of Perfectly Useless Information for the reason that learning about this forgotten scientist will not impact your life other than a few "Ohhhh, that's surprizing!" moments. That being said, I enjoyed seeing when and how everyday ideas and objects came into actuality and becoming one the few that know about Francis Galton's life-long contributions.
Extreme Measures is a biography of Galton's life starting in early childhood and ending at his quiet death. It reads in an easy to follow chronological order as opposed to a stream of facts and figures characteristic of Galton's own works. I'd compare the text best to books like That Book of Perfectly Useless Information for the reason that learning about this forgotten scientist will not impact your life other than a few "Ohhhh, that's surprizing!" moments. That being said, I enjoyed seeing when and how everyday ideas and objects came into actuality and becoming one the few that know about Francis Galton's life-long contributions.
August 17, 2009
Decent biography of an important but forgotten man. Does a pretty good job tracking him throughout his entire life.
Read
September 2, 2009research methods lecture finally reminded me of the name of this book. very good read with a story on probability.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews