Gavan Tredoux on Francis Galton: A Traitwell Conversation with AUDIO
To understand our genomics work it helps to understand the polymath who undergirds its insights
I recently held a Twitter space with my Traitwell colleague Gavan Tredoux discussing his new book on Francis Galton, the polymathic English statistician and explorer.
In the spirit of full disclosure Gavan and I met many years ago at an intelligence conference and we remain colleagues and friends.
I believe in polymaths and try to hire them and Gavan is one such. His works are very worthwhile and I’m working my way through his second volume having just gone through the first.
The books are:
Francis Galton’s Nature and Nurture: 1822 - 1865
Francis Galton’s Genius: 1865 - 1911
Galton more or less was “the world’s first data scientist” per Tredoux and Galton’s insights have inspired me ever since I first came across his work several years ago.
It’s my view that a lot of the books and thinkers dismissed by present day purists don’t adequately capture the role that the past plays in the present. They don’t get how alive a lot of these past days really are, and how we might have taken other paths. Nothing is altogether settled. These critics don’t often appreciate how delightfully complex, foreign, and altogether magnificent the past is.
Call it my Straussian education but I still think there’s lots of fascinating things to glean from the works of the past and that you can, in fact, use those insights with more modern technology to unlock real value for the world. You have to wade through controversy, to be sure, but once you’ve done so, there’s quite a lot of power and riches available on the other side. Or at least, so I’ve come to believe.
Galton was keen observer of the natural world — Gavan and I go into his travels in what is now Namimbia — and his gentleman scientist approach really does need to come back if we are to make any progress on the trickier aspects of scientific inquiry. Ditch the man cave and bring back the study, lads!
Among other topics Gavan and I discussed how we’re not exactly IQ supremacists which has become a weird sub-niche.
I used to be a believer in IQ having a huge role to play in the world but this quote from a Tom Wolfe novel, A Man in Full, more or less has convinced me of its limits.
The Wiz looked upon [Crocker] as an aging, uneducated, and out-of-date country boy who had somehow, nonetheless, managed to create a large, and, until recently, wildly successful corporation. That the country boy, with half his brainpower, should be the lord of the corporation and that [the Wiz] should be his vassal was an anomaly, a perversity of fate. . . . Or part of him felt that way. The other part of him was in awe, in unconscious awe, of something the old boy had and he didn’t: namely, the power to charm men and the manic drive to bend their wills into saying yes to projects they didn’t want, didn’t need, and never thought about before. . . . And that thing was manhood. It was as simple as that.
There are always going to be areas that are just slightly removed from quantification — that je ne sais quoi which makes life altogether interesting.
I’m with the Lebanese-American poet Kahil Gibran who once wrote… “And to be understood is to be leveled down, And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness”
So it is with a lot of our polymaths, long may their ideas reign.