Statistically unlikely

Eileen Magnello¹

BOOK REVIEWED-Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry

by Michael Bulmer

Johns Hopkins University Press: 2003. 376 pp. $45, £33.50

The life of the Victorian polymath Francis Galton — who explored South Africa, created weather charts, introduced finger-printing, studied anthropology, devised statistical methods and is perhaps best known for fostering ideas of hereditary improvement of humans through eugenics — continues to exert fascination for historians and scientists. A recent biography by the geneticist Nicholas Wright Gillham (see Nature 415, 19–20; 2002) is now joined by statistician Michael Bulmer's book, which provides a distillation of some of Galton's ideas of heredity and statistics, reinterpreted from current thinking.

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