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

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.

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...