A Life of Sir Francis Galton by Nicholas Wright Gillham, Oxford, $35,
ISBN 0195143655
POOR Francis Galton. Forever in the shadow of his cousin, Charles Darwin, he
was eventually branded the “father of eugenics”. But was he a victim of his
times, an upstanding Victorian boffin with views now rather out of fashion? Or
did he provide the intellectual underpinnings for much that went wrong in the
20th century?
Alas, Nicholas Wright Gillham may be very good on the detail of Galton’s
intriguing life, but he is rather poor on analysing his impact. And at the end
of A Life…
