Reviews for Extreme measures

The average rating for Extreme measures based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-22 00:00:00 Michael Demarco Imagine The Beatles on the left hand side, Hitler on the right hand side, and Francis Galton in the middle. Yes, that will need a little explanation. When Georgia (my daughter) was little she watched Wizard of Oz and Yellow Submarine obsessively and in the latter psychedelical cartoon there is a character called Jeremy who I now realise must have been modelled on Francis Galton. He talks like this Ad hoc, ad lock and quid pro quo…so little time, so much to know! Eminent physicist, polyglot, catalyst, prizewinning botanist, hardwriting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist, too! Turboprop super combustible spring! Metrocyclonic and stereophonic! This motor, I see, has a broken down…thing! Logsign clocksign, big thingamabob…let’s see, chewing gum will do the job! Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, invented eugenics – that’s where Hitler comes in. He was one of those Victorian gentleman scientists who investigated what he damn well pleased, so his career would give a housefly lessons in zigzagging. In the early 1860s he was investigating problems of mapping Africa, which he had recently explored, naturally, when he zagged off to discover the formula for the perfect cup of tea C + ne = (C+n) t C= n (e-t)/(t-1) (Martin Brookes comments : impossible to understand his tea-brewing theory); then calculated how much gold there was in the whole world and if it would fit inside his house (he concluded he would only need his dining room); then investigated some meteorology problem and named the anti-cyclone which before then hadn’t been noticed. He was a whirligig of science! When his cousin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he became an instant convert and he began to think ”if farmers could use artificial selection to exaggerate desirable features in animals and plants, then why could not society do the same to the minds and bodies of men?” So he began to investigate if talent or intelligence was hereditary. There was no previous published information on this, nothing, but FG liked it like that, he usually didn’t bother researching what other people thought about a topic, he just thought hard and plunged ahead on his own. Those were the days. ( It may be worth remembering that, for instance, a lot of people really did believe that some event which happened to the mother during pregnancy would have a direct effect on the child, as in Joseph Merrick’s account of his mother being knocked over by a circus elephant leading to his own extreme disfigurement.) He published his first big article on what he later (in 1883) named as eugenics in 1864 and he anticipated certain criticisms, but perhaps not the ones you may have thought of yourself : Galton’s aim was clear – the improvement of mental ability through selective breeding … There was, it seems, a popular belief at the time that what eminent men had in intellect, they lacked in sexual prowess and physical strength…selecting for [mental] ability might lead to the creation of a race of brainy, asexual weaklings. [Concerning this Galton wrote] “I, however, find that very great men are certainly not averse to the other sex, for some such have been noted for their illicit intercourses” So that would not be a problem. Since he was contemplating the general improvement of the whole human race he had to assess the strengths and weaknesses of other races. On Africans : The Negro has strong impulsive passions… He is warmhearted, loving towards his Master’s children, and idolised by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-toming or dancing. On Americans : enterprising, defiant and touchy; impatient of authority; furious politicians; very tolerant of fraud and violence; possessing much high and generous spirit, and some true religious feeling, but strongly addicted to cant. Brookes comments : For someone apparently so devoted to the discovery of natural truths, Galton was surprisingly quick to abandon his scientific methods when it came to the issue of race. I would just like to have amended the word surprisingly in that sentence to unsurprisingly. In 1869 he published his first big eugenics book Hereditary Genius. The reviews were modestly appreciative but inclined to apply cold water : Unfortunately, young men will fall in love, and girls will marry them without considering the effect of the union upon the race. Galton needed some proof to back up his notions about human heredity but there was no information. So he decided to get the raw data he needed himself. In so doing, he helped considerably to found the discipline of sociological statistics. In one amusing example, he showed that the life expectancy of clergymen was slightly less than that of doctors, which led him to publish an article called Statistical Enquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer. This generated a great controversy, during which he pointed out robustly that most churches were fitted with lightning rods. By 1873 his eugenic theories were coming together. They now began to sound like Heinrich Himmler. In Galton’s future society, regional eugenics offices would assess everyone’s fitness to breed. He thought these superior types would voluntarily coalesce into a tightly-knit social unit separate from mainstream society. But this social unit might become the target of hostility – Galton therefore suggested : let them take ship and emigrate and become the parents of a new state, with a glorious future. Brookes describes the fate of the others : the reproductive undesirables would be expected to repress their most basic instincts. Ominous consequences awaited those who failed to confirm to a celibate life. Anyone found guilty of illicit procreation would be considered “enemies to the state, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness” Whatever that meant. He died in 1911. If he’d have lived another 30 years he’d have found out exactly what it would mean to forfeit all claims to kindness from the state. Galton was aware that his theories were entirely anti-democratic. He stated that democracy: demands equal consideration for the feelings of all, just in the same way as their rights are equally maintained by law. But it goes farther than this, for it asserts that men are of equal value as social units, equally capable of voting, and the rest. This feeling is undeniably wrong and cannot last. We automatically think “Victorian fascist!” when we read such stuff, but who has never been tempted into Galtonian thinking? Needing yet more data to back up this lunatic stuff, he zagged off into investigating criminology and pioneering experimental psychology. He invented word-association tests way before Freud, and he wrote the first book on the science of fingerprinting, and thus proved to the previously doubting top cops at Scotland Yard that this was the best way of identifying criminals. Then back to zoology. For some crackbrained reason he wanted to find out which of the various animals at London Zoo could hear high pitched sounds. So : I contrived a hollow cane made like a walking stick, having a removable whistle at its lower end, with an exposed indiarubber tube under its curved handle. Whenever I squeezed the tube against the handle, air was pushed through the whistle. I tried it at nearly all the cages in the Zoological Gardens, but with little result of interest, except that it certainly annoyed some of the lions. "Stop that right now!" Then, he began to think about what we would now call body language. He decided he needed another piece of apparatus to find out exactly how much people were interested in each other at a dinner table. He thought about inserting a pressure gauge in the legs of the chairs of the guests to measure how much they “inclined” their chairs towards each other, but gave it up as not practical. He did a lot of foreign travel, and decided to classify the pulchritude of the female population in the different European cities he visited. There were six size categories, ranging from “thin” to “prize fat”. Nothing about people was too trivial for him to want to document and measure. He tried to calibrate boredom by counting how often different types of people in an audience fidget during a performance. Apart from being a proto-Nazi, Galton was hilarious. The eugenics theories, after a rocky start, became popular from the 1890s onwards. George Bernard Shaw : What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see each other again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour. (It sounds like he is talking about Saturday night in Nottingham.) Eugenics lost a lot of its allure after Hitler and Himmler, but its ideas tend to slide in through the back door quite easily. These days it is through genetics. Who can forget, Martin Brookes asks, the infamous Daily Mail headline : ABORTION HOPE AFTER “GAY GENE” FINDINGS So – this is a great little biography of a fascinating character. This review is long enough, I think, but still I didn’t tell you the half of it.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-04-02 00:00:00 Jenifer Henry This is a fantastic book on Sir Francis Galton. You will finish the book feeling like you have learned a lot about the man, his life and scientific achievements. I will list a few things about him that are generally not known. F. Galton explored Africa for two years, his book "The Art of Travel" is the first survival guide ever written (pg 116). In 1855 it was he who recommended survival training in the wild to The British Army. He would become the first lecturer on the topic (pg 118) Today, it is basic that everyone in the military receive training on survival in the wild. F. Galton would play a key part in recommending Geography be taught in public school (pg 122). The author refers to F. Galton as a "born again Darwinian" after reading "On the Origin of Species" (pg 145). The book has also heavily influenced Richard Dawkins. I am going to have to read this book in the near future. F. Galton would say he owed much of his scientific impulses to Darwin (pg 236). Here is something interesting, The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1868 had admission exams (pg 161) Today, there are many people such as Jordan Peterson, that consider entrance exams, nothing more than I.Q. tests. Contrary to what many believe about F. Galton, it was not the Anglo-Saxons of his day, but the Ancient Greeks, around 500 B.C. called the Athenians who were superior to all others. Socrates and Phidias were at the top of eminence. (pg 164). In his last years, F. Galton would write a fictional book "Kantsaywhere" In a society where you had to pass two exams in order to live a life of success and happiness. If you failed an exam you were sent to work in labour camps. F. Galton was not successful in getting the book published and only a random number of pages survived (pg 289 - 290). I found it funny when I read this because I have seen commercials and trailers about movies and TV shows with very similar stories and to think F. Galton thought of it first. "The Thinning" is one of the movies, but I have not seen it. If ever in London you can visit F. Galton's home at 42 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1BN, United Kingdom.