ABSTRACT

Given the multiplicity of perceptual skills we have for perceiving faces, and the many brain regions involved in face perception, a natural question concerns how this organisation comes about. Once again, the controversial figure of Sir Francis Galton looms large, this time from his study of eminent Victorian ‘English men of science’, to which he gave the subtitle ‘their nature and nurture’ (Galton, 1874). Galton was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin and is now controversial because of his interest in eugenics — a term he himself coined — which became inextricably intertwined with some of the most dreadful political events of the twentieth century.