Birding with a Purpose: Of Raptors, Gaboons, and Other Creatures Book

A fun read on an important and underappreciated scientist, though I wish it'd focused more on the African Exploration and Hereditary Genius portions of Galton's life and less on the petty drama and infighting within the various scientific societies Galton participated in.

For those unaware: Galton was immensely important in the early days of Behavioral Genetics (with early forerunners of twins studies, adoption studies, and pedigree analysis in his work on genetics), served on the Royal Commission on Meteorology, explored Africa and made some important contribution to the knowledge of it's geography, played a key role in bringing fingerprinting to the attention of police as a means of identifying and tracking criminals, and as a scientific mentor, influenced Karl Pearson and others important in some of the most important work on evolutionary biology.

A true Victorian polymath, eccentric in some entertaining ways (he loved to quantify everything, so he invented a handheld counter that let him discreetly tally things up: when he wanted to count the number of pretty women in a room, the number of yawns a given lecturer produced in an audience, and more) and in some unintended ways, the intellectual justification for eugenics (because he correctly pointed out the impact of gens on behavior/intelligence), and as a by-product, the horrors of the early 20th's century worst excesses-- forced sterilization in the US, Nazism in Germany, etc.