Scientist and explorer, born in Birmingham, West Midlands, C England, UK. He studied at Birmingham, London, and Cambridge, but left the study of medicine to travel in N and S Africa. He is best known for his studies of heredity and intelligence, such as Hereditary Genius (1869), which led to the field he called eugenics. Several of his ideas are referred to in the work of his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton was knighted in 1909.
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Francis Galton |
|
| Born |
February 16, 1822 Birmingham, England |
|---|---|
| Died |
January 17, 1911 Haslemere, Surrey, England |
| Residence | UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | Anthropologist and polymath |
| Institution |
Meteorological Council Royal Geographical Society |
| Alma Mater |
King's College Cambridge University |
| Doctoral Advisor | William Hopkins |
| Doctoral Students | Karl Pearson |
| Known for | Eugenics |
| Notable Prizes | Copley medal (1910) |
Sir Francis Galton F.R.S.
Galton produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime and was knighted in 1909. He created the statistical concepts of regression and correlation and discovered regression toward the mean, was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.
Biography
Early life
He was born near Sparkbrook, Birmingham and was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin. His father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel "John" Galton. The Galtons were famous and highly successful Quaker gun-manufacturers and bankers, while the Darwins were distinguished in medicine and science.
Both families boasted Fellows of the Royal Society and members who loved to invent in their spare time. Both Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Galton were founder members of the famous Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose members included Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Priestley, Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin and other distinguished scientists and industrialists. Likewise, both families boasted literary talent, with Erasmus Darwin notorious for composing lengthy technical treatises in verse, and Aunt Mary Anne Galton known for her writing on aesthetics and religion, and her notable autobiography detailing the unique environment of her childhood populated by Lunar Society members.
Galton was by many accounts a child prodigy--he was reading by the age of 2, at age 5 he knew some Greek, Latin and long division, and by the age of six he had moved on to adult books, including Shakespeare for pleasure, and poetry, which he quoted at length.
In his early years Galton was an enthusiastic traveler, and made a notable solo trip through Eastern Europe to Constantinople, before going up to Cambridge. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic survey of the region.
In 1853 he married Louisa Butler, who also came from an intellectually distinguished family, and after a honeymoon in Florence and Rome, they took up residence in South Kensington, where he remained almost until his death in 1911.
Middle years
Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields of science, including geography, statistics, biology and anthropology.
Heredity, historiometry and eugenics
The event that changed his life and gave him direction was the publication by his cousin Charles Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859. Galton was gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on Variation under Domestication concerning the breeding of domestic animals. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data gathered.
Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was indeed hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. He also proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate out the effects of heredity and environment.
The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. The studies were published as a book, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture in 1874.
Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins.
Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development. He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives.
His ideas would greatly influence similar movements in many other countries.
Galton's study of human abilities ultimately led to the foundation of differential psychology, the formulation of the first mental tests, and the scientific study of human intelligence. for example, his study of reaction time as a measure of intelligence was only vindicated a hundred years later, as was his assertion of a relationship between head size and intelligence (MRI measures are now known to correlate at approximately 0.4 with I.Q.).
Galton conducted wide-ranging inquiries into heredity. Galton, in consultation with Darwin, set out to see if they were transported in the blood. Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), and was an early proponent of "hard heredity" through selection alone.
Galton came close to rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory of inheritance, but was prevented from making the final breakthrough in this regard because of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete, traits (now known as polygenic traits). He went on to found the Biometric approach to the study of heredity, distinguished by its use of statistical techniques to study continuous traits and population-scale aspects of heredity. Fisher would later show how the biometrical approach could be reconciled with the Mendelian approach.) The statistical techniques that Galton invented (correlation, regression - see below) and phenomena he established (regression to the mean) formed the basis of the biometric approach and are now essential tools in all the social sciences.
Galton also devised a technique called composite photography, described in detail in Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development, which he believed could be used to identify 'types' by appearance, which he hoped would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces.
Statistics, regression and correlation
His inquiries into the mind involved detailed recording of subjects' own explanations for whether and how their minds dealt with things such as mental imagery, which he elicited by his pioneering use of the questionnaire.
Galton invented the use of the regression line, and was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of sweet peas.
After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton introduced the concept of correlation in 1888.
He also developed early theories of ranges of sound and hearing, and collected large quantities of anthropometric data from the public through his popular and long-running Anthropometric Laboratory.
Fingerprints
In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (1892, 1893 and 1895) Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by William Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, without which it would not have been accepted by the courts.
Final years
In an effort to reach a wider audience, Galton worked on a novel entitled ‘Kantsaywhere’, from May until December of 1910. Galton wrote to his niece that it should be either “smothered or superseded”.
Honors and impact
He received in 1853 the highest award from the Royal Geographical Society, one of two gold medals awarded that year, for his explorations and map-making of southwest Africa. Over the course of his career he received every major award the Victorian scientific establishment could offer, including the Copley medal of the Royal Society. His statistical heir Karl Pearson, first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London, wrote a three-volume biography of Galton after his death (1914, 1924, 1930).
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