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.

A lively and unorthodox biography of one of the Victorian age's most eccentric and prolific scientific minds.

'...this is a splendid, first-class book, the definitive book on Francis Galton and his legacy. The editing has been superb...The timing of its publication is excellent in relation to the increasing interest in human genetics in all areas of the biological and behavioural sciences'.R.Plomin, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Development and Health Genetics, Pennsylvania State University Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a grandson of Erasmus Darwin, was one of the most versatile men of his time. In his twenties he won fame as an explorer. He worked at the prediction of weather, and described his discovery of the anticyclone He first became an anthropologist in 1862 when he joined the Ethnological Society. He initiated anthropometry and the measurement of human variation, and the use of photography for the analysis of differencies, or individual characteristics, in a group. He recognised the uniqueness of Finger Prints, and, in 1875, first used the records of pairs of identical twins in his researches into the laws of heredity. Besides contributions to human genetics, Galton devised the correlation coefficient, and was thus concerned with the advancement of statistics. In 1883, he coined the word eugenics by which he meant 'good in birth' and 'noble in heredity', and, in 1904, he founded the Galton Laboratory at University College, London. He was first President of the Eugenics Education Society in 1907.

If not for the work of his half cousin Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory might have met a somewhat different fate. In particular, with no direct evidence of natural selection and no convincing theory of heredity to explain it, Darwin needed a mathematical explanation of variability and heredity. Galton's work in biometry—the application of statistical methods to the biological sciences—laid the foundations for precisely that. This book offers readers a compelling portrait of Galton as the "father of biometry," tracing the development of his ideas and his accomplishments, and placing them in their scientific context. Though Michael Bulmer introduces readers to the curious facts of Galton's life—as an explorer, as a polymath and member of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, and as a proponent of eugenics—his chief concern is with Galton's pioneering studies of heredity, in the course of which he invented the statistical tools of regression and correlation. Bulmer describes Galton's early ambitions and experiments—his investigations of problems of evolutionary importance (such as the evolution of gregariousness and the function of sex), and his movement from the development of a physiological theory to a purely statistical theory of heredity, based on the properties of the normal distribution. This work, culminating in the law of ancestral heredity, also put Galton at the heart of the bitter conflict between the "ancestrians" and the "Mendelians" after the rediscovery of Mendelism in 1900. A graceful writer and an expert biometrician, Bulmer details the eventual triumph of biometrical methods in the history of quantitative genetics based on Mendelian principles, which underpins our understanding of evolution today.