Francis Galton: The man who drew up the 'ugly map' of Britain and father of eugenics

One hundred years after the death of Francis Galton, the "father of eugenics", geneticists are increasingly baffled by the nature versus nurture debate, writes Professor Steve Jones.

Type the phrase "scientists find the gene for" into Google and 68,000 results appear. Most of the hits are about human beings - which is a pretty impressive number, given that we have only 20,000 genes altogether.

The hits include genes for depression, religiosity, insomnia, marital failure and, perhaps surprisingly, premature ejaculation.

Does what we are born with make us what we will become, or is it the way we live? Newspapers tend to believe in nature - DNA, while sociologists go for nurture - the environment.

As they learn more, geneticists are finding that they have less and less of an idea about which is more important, or whether the question means anything in the first place.

Charles Darwin had an equally brilliant, but less well-known, cousin. He died 100 years ago in 1911.

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Galton applied statistics to many things, including the efficacy of prayer

This year is Galton year - a celebration of Francis Galton, a genius - but a flawed genius. He did many surprising things. He was the first person to use fingerprints in detective work and the first to publish a weather map, in the Times newspaper in 1875.

Galton is best known for his interest in inheritance. His book Hereditary Genius is sometimes said to have founded human genetics, and Galton founded the science (if that is the right word) of eugenics.

Its main aim was "to check the birth rate of the Unfit and improve the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriage of the best stock".

Beauty map

At his death, he left the then enormous sum of £45,000 to found the Laboratory of National Eugenics at University College London (UCL).

The term was soon abandoned by UCL, although we still have a Galton Professorship. Even so eugenical ideas of good genes, bad genes, and all the rest is still very much in the public mind.

In fact, the most important part of Galton's work had nothing to do with eugenics, for he was one of the first to realise that science - biology as much as physics - needs maths rather than words. He was one of the founders of the science of statistics, and he measured many things.

He made statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer - he got into trouble for that for he found that those people frequently prayed for, like monarchs, lived no longer than anyone else.

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Steve Jones: Language of the Genes

He even made a beauty map of Britain, based on a secret grading of the local women on a scale from attractive to repulsive (the low point was in Aberdeen).

In a letter to Nature in 1879 entitled The Average Flush of Excitement, Galton recounts a visit to the Derby. He noted that while he was there he was able to assess what he called "the average tint of the complexion of the British upper classes" by observing the distant crowd through his opera glass.

He observed that after the race started, the crowd became "suffused with a strong pink tint, just as though a sun-set glow had fallen upon it". Galton found that he could work out the mood of a mass of people even without being able to distinguish one person from the next.

Some of his work has a strong resonance in modern science. Everyone knows that tall parents tend to have tall children, but Galton was the first to do some measuring.

He noted that the children of two six-footers tended to be tall, but not quite as tall as their parents. He called that "regression to the mean" and we now know that it happens because lots of genes are involved, with some hidden by others.

Sex is a way of mixing those genes - of reshuffling the genetic cards - and the child tends to inherit a more average kind of hand than that received by either of their exceptionally tall parents.

Of course, the environment is involved too. Food, exercise, good health, all are important in deciding how tall one will become. For height, and for almost anything else, nature and nurture always work together. It makes no sense to try to separate them.

We know of more than 50 different genes associated with height

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