Darkness falls
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1306167,00.html
Steven Rose is fascinated by Extreme Measures, Martin Brookes's life
of the father of eugenics, Francis Galton
Saturday September 18, 2004
The Guardian
Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton
by Martin Brookes
298pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99
Mr Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens's novel Hard Times, sums up his
life's philosophy in terms of what can be measured with a ruler and
calculated in units of time. For Gradgrind, culture, art and poetry
are mere frippery, a waste of space. Francis Galton, in Martin
Brookes's biography, reminds one irresistibly of Gradgrind, forever
measuring: the dimensions of noses, the strength of hand grip, the
number of minutes he spends looking at a picture his sister has
painted for him - and the number of brush strokes required to create a
portrait. Quantity determines quality. But in Galton, Gradgrind merges
with another figure, the mad inventor of Heath Robinson devices.
Galton's bicycle speedometer, for example, required the rider to
measure the diameter of his wheels, and count and time their
revolutions with a hand-held hourglass as he rode. Scarcely
surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have caught on. The same was true for
virtually all the cranky proposals and inventions that Galton
published over his long life. With, however, one notable exception,
that for which his name is still mainly remembered - eugenics.
Steven Rose
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Francis Galton
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Martin Brookes
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Eugenics eugenicists eugenicist eugenically eugenic
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