[tt] TLS: Jim Endersby: Aberdeen woman

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Jim Endersby: Aberdeen woman
The TLS 	March 25, 2005

EXTREME MEASURES. The dark visions and bright ideas of Francis Galton. By 
Martin Brookes. 298pp. Bloomsbury. Pounds 16.99 (US $24.95). - 0 7475 6666 
6

Francis Galton was one of Victorian Britain's most extraordinary 
characters. His interests ranged from measuring Hottentot women's buttocks 
(using a theodolite) to developing some of the techniques of modern 
fingerprinting, statistics and meteorology. Yet he is destined to be 
remembered for just one thing: in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human 
Faculty, he coined the term "eugenics" (from the Greek eugenes, well bred) 
to describe his new science of improving humans. As a result, his name 
will forever be linked to the sad case of Carrie Buck, whose supposed 
unfitness to reproduce -the evidence for which was little more than having 
a child out of wedlock at the age of twenty -prompted Justice Oliver 
Wendell Holmes's infamous remark that "three generations of imbeciles are 
enough". Buck was one of about 3,000 people forcibly sterilized under US 
eugenic laws. Sixty thousand were sterilized in Sweden, and of course, 
eugenics inspired the Nazi policies of race hygiene, beginning with 
sterilization of the supposedly unfit and inferior and ending in their 
wholesale slaughter.

Historians who work on Galton have to ask if he is ultimately responsible 
for this sinister legacy. Some have defended him on the grounds that he 
was mostly interested in "positive eugenics", encouraging those he 
regarded as the best people to have more children, as opposed to "negative 
eugenics" -discouraging the supposedly inferior from breeding at all. The 
claim is hard to reconcile with his assertion that, while undesirables who 
remained celibate were to be treated "with all kindness", if they insisted 
on procreating, "such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, 
and to have forfeited all claims to kindness". It is hard not to glimpse 
the gas chambers in that statement.

In similar vein, apologists for Galton sometimes claim that, although he 
was a racist, so were most Victorians. Martin Brookes, to his credit, has 
no truck with this approach, pointing out in Extreme Measures that 
"although you could offer a cultural or historical defence for Galton's 
comments", it is hard not to be shocked by "the sheer frequency with which 
he reiterates his racist views". The horror is reinforced by the way 
Galton used racial stereotypes to "prove" that mental qualities were 
inherited and not determined by environment: he contended that although 
American Indians lived across a wide area, in many different climates, 
environments and cultures, they were uniformly ugly, stupid and lacked 
properly human sentiments.

However, having admitted how obnoxious Galton's views were, Brookes works 
hard to arouse and maintain our interest and sympathy in him. He opts for 
the strategy of telling all the familiar anecdotes about Galton's 
multitudinous scientific interests, from worshipping Punch cartoons (in an 
effort to enter the mind of a savage idolater) to mapping the beauty of 
British women (London, he concluded, had the most; Aberdeen the fewest). 
For readers who know nothing of Galton, this book provides a reasonably 
written and clear account of the diversity of the man's interests, but the 
anecdotes will be all too familiar to anyone who has read Galton's own 
Memories of My Life, Karl Pearson's The Life, Letters and Labours of 
Francis Galton, or the more recent, scholarly biography A Life of Sir 
Francis Galton, by Nicholas Wright Gillham (2002). There are no surprises 
in Extreme Measures for anyone who knows these sources, and it is 
difficult to judge if Brookes has done any research beyond reading them, 
since he (or his publisher) has chosen not to include references, a 
bibliography or even an index.

The accumulation of anecdotes also gives little sense of what (if 
anything) connected Galton's interests, a problem exacerbated by Brookes's 
decision not to describe the wider historical context. He doesn't seem 
interested, for example, in asking why eugenics was largely ridiculed in 
the 1850s and 60s when Galton first suggested it, but enthusiastically 
embraced when he "re-launched" it in 1900. A deep economic depression 
affected Britain towards the end of the century, largely undermining the 
mid-century optimism about unending economic growth and social progress. 
The fin de siecle saw depression, unemployment, increasing imperial 
competition abroad and the rise of militant socialist organizations at 
home; all of which fuelled fears that the mighty English race was 
"degenerating" and made eugenic solutions seem more attractive than they 
had appeared forty years earlier. One gains no real idea of any of this 
from this book, but it is difficult to make sense of Galton's shifting 
interests and strategies without it.

Stripped of context, Galton looks like a buffoon, but it's worth asking 
how his experiments appeared at the time. For example, his attempt to 
assess the respective contributions of nature and nurture by looking at 
biographies of eminent men concluded that, since eminent men were often 
related to each other, their inherited abilities made them eminent 
(potential nepotism being overlooked).

Galton's reasoning is self-evidently circular by the standards of modern 
science, but those are the wrong standards to apply. Given the 
nineteenth-century ignorance of the degree (if any), to which mental 
traits and complex behaviours could be inherited, Galton's attempts to 
find evidence for his theories were no more outlandish than his cousin 
Charles Darwin's attempts to demonstrate the evolution of human emotions. 
Darwin visited London Zoo and recorded that a baboon was "first insulted" 
by its keeper, "who then made friends with him and shook hands". The 
baboon then appeared to laugh heartily, "proving" that laughter was not 
uniquely human. A modern investigator would doubt the value of this 
anecdote, yet Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the 
Animals (1872) is built on such evidence. More sense of what Galton's 
contemporaries thought and wrote about inheritance would have helped 
readers understand why this bizarre figure was so widely respected in his 
day. However much one despises his views and their legacy, Francis Galton 
deserves to be understood a little better than this book allows us to.