QI The Book of the Dead

and pessimists, people with blond hair and blue eyes, and scoured international court cases to come up with his ‘honesty’ index. Britain (naturally) came top, while Greece was ‘the centre of gravity for lying’. He ‘proved’ that prayer was ineffective by noting the average ages of the British royal family (for whom, in those days, every congregation in the country dutifully prayed each Sunday) and demonstrating that they lived no longer than anyone else. He even developed a mathematical formula for a perfect cup of tea, designing and building his own thermometer to test it. (The water, according to Galton, should be 82–87 °C and sit on the leaves for precisely eight minutes – the result will be ‘full bodied, full tasted, and in no way bitter or flat’.)

    In over 300 books and articles, Galton alternated between serious scientist and mad boffin. For every ‘Gumption-Reviver Machine’ (a mobile dripping tap positioned above the head to keep students alert) there were genuine scientific insights. His pioneering work in meteorology produced the first working weather map. His ‘anthropometric laboratory’, based in the South Kensington Museum in London, collated the measurements of almost 10,000 human bodies revealing for the first time that fingerprints were unique and invariable throughout a person’s life. Galton’s 200-page book Finger Prints (1890) led to the adoption of fingerprint identification by the Metropolitan Police.
    Galton had always had a knack of seeing patterns in pages of dull numerical data that eluded other people. His cousin’s publication of On the Origin of Species had a galvanising effect on him. He became fascinated by the idea of measuring the apparently random variations produced by natural selection. By plotting the height of parents against that of their offspring he noticed that exceptionally tall parents tended to have children who were less tall than they were. In fact, by drawing a line on his graph he was able to show that their offspring were only two-thirds as exceptional. Galton had uncovered a mathematical law: ‘regression towards the mean’, the tendency for a series of measurements over time to move closer to the average point. This was a major breakthrough, especially for a mathematician of unexceptional ability, and it was to transform statistics into a proper science. There was ‘scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the Law’, wrote Galton with characteristic immodesty. ‘It would have been personified by the Greeks, and deified, if they had known of it.’ Outstanding though it undoubtedly was, Galtoncame unstuck when he tried to apply the law to far more complex human qualities such as intelligence.
    In Hereditary Genius (1864) he became the first person to frame the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, and the opening sentence makes plain which side he is on: ‘I propose to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance.’ What follows is an attempt to prove that ‘greatness’ runs in families. It is full of powerful ideas and the statistical evidence is impressively marshalled – Darwin said that he did not ‘think that ever in all my life I read anything more interesting or original’ – but it is also wilfully selective. Geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Faraday, whose families showed no obvious aptitude for art or science, are omitted. The argument is based on a false premise; Galton’s own experiments had shown that the expression of intelligence can be markedly different even between identical twins, and there is, in fact, no single ‘intelligence’ gene. Worse, the work is disfigured by a casual racism that today is deeply uncomfortable to read. In the chapter ‘The Comparative Worth of Different Races’, Galton places human intelligence in a hierarchy with the ancient Greeks at the top, two classes above the average Anglo-Saxon, who is in turn two classes above black Africans, with Australian Aboriginals at the bottom. ‘The number among the negroes of those whom we should call halfwitted men’, Galton blithely opined, ‘is very large.’
    Galton was knighted in 1909 and died two years later, just a few months before he turned ninety, like Humboldt. Eccentric to the last, he experimented with controlling his bronchial problems by smoking hashish. To the very end, he was sure he knew best. Odd as he undoubtedly was