QI The Book of the Dead

simple, organising theory that binds it all together. Fascinating as Kosmos is to read, most of the science in it has been superseded by more recent research. Nevertheless, if the last 150 years of biology have been a series of footnotes to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Humboldt’s time is now. Faced with the possibility of catastrophic global warming, we can see just how prescient he had been about the earth as a single system. Darwin might have helped us join thedots in the tree of life, but to comprehend the climatic and geological forces that create and sustain it, Humboldt is still the man.
    His work is imbued with the spirit of liberty and freedom that had animated the revolutions in America and France. His experiences in South America left him with a strong distaste for colonialism, for much the same reasons as Mary Kingsley: it demeaned both parties. And Kosmos makes his views on race plain: ‘While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men … All are in like degree designed for freedom.’
    Darwin enthusiastically endorsed this sentiment, but one of the unforeseen consequences of his evolutionary theory was that it encouraged the idea that human beings were ‘improvable’. In the last paragraph of The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin writes: ‘Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale.’ The crucial phrase here is ‘ not through his own exertions ’. Man has been ‘improved’ by the operations of natural selection, not by the imposition of his own will. Darwin’s point is that, for all man’s noble qualities and achievements, he still bears the ‘the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’.

     
    At some point, this distinction became confused in the otherwise brilliantly original mind of his cousin and occasional collaborator, the statistician Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton will forever be associated with the theory of eugenics (from the Greek for ‘well born’), which proposed that selective breeding could be used to create a race of fitter, stronger and more intelligent humans. ‘What nature does blindly, slowly, andruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,’ he wrote. The idea of breeding out the bad traits in humanity isn’t intrinsically immoral; it’s just based on bad science. There is no evidence that intelligence, still less virtue, is inherited. But Galton believed it and persuaded many others it was true. H. G. Wells, Sylvia Pankhurst, George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes were all eugenicists. Their motivations were honourable – they genuinely thought that ‘breeding out badness’ would deliver a better world. But the potential applications of Galton’s ideas – most notably in Nazi Germany – have made eugenics a word that produces a shudder of disgust.
    Galton’s intellectual pedigree was impeccable. He shared a grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, with his cousin Charles, and the families were closely interknit (two of Francis’s brothers were called Erasmus and Darwin). The Darwins were doctors and scientists; the Galtons were free-thinking Quaker bankers. Both families had produced members of the Royal Society and both helped found the Lunar Society, the influential think-tank of industrialists, scientists and philosophers that included James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood. Young Francis was an infant prodigy. He learned to read at two and a half and got extra coaching from his older sister Adele, who had a congenital spinal defect that confined her to the house. She proved to be a talented teacher, though her baby brother took most of the credit:
    I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock .
     

    This conceitedness, amusingly forgivable in a precocious child, never left Galton. He was clever but socially inept. At the age of five he was sent to a small school in Birmingham. He hated it. ‘No one had heard of, let alone read, The Iliad ,’ he complained. The narrowness of the curriculum oppressed him and turned him into a disruptive influence. This carried over into his studies at