Francis Galton
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Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911) was a Victorian polymath, British anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was additionally the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
Galton produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime and was Knighted in 1909. He created the statistical concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean, was the first to apply statistical methods to scientific inquiry, 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. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term "eugenics" and the phrase "nature versus nurture". As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology (the branch of psychology that concerns itself with psychological differences between people, rather than on common traits). He devised a method for classifying fingerprints useful in forensics. As the initiator of scientific meteorology: he invented the weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale.[1]
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Biography
Early life
He was born into the Darwin-Wedgwood family near Sparkbrook, Birmingham and was Charles Darwin's half first cousin, his mother and Darwin's father having been children of Erasmus Darwin by separate marriages. His father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel "John" Galton.
Galton was a child prodigy--by the age of six he was reading adult books, including Shakespeare for pleasure, and he knew Latin and long division. He went to a number of schools, but he chafed at the narrow classical curriculum. His parents encouraged him to enter the medical profession, and he studied for two years at Birmingham General hospital and King's College Medical School in London. He spent a third year learning more scientific subjects, where he did well. He followed this up with two years at Cambridge's Trinity College, starting in 1840. However, he failed to graduate from University of Cambridge, taking a "pass" degree.
His father died in 1844, leaving him financially independent, and he took up a gentlemanly interest in science.
Galton in his early years was an enthusiastic traveler, and made a notable trip through Eastern Europe, including Constantinople. In 1845 and 1846 he went to Egypt and traveled down the Nile. In 1850 to 1852 he mounted a long and difficult expedition into little-known south western Africa (now Namibia). He wrote several books on his experiences, including The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move. His reports of his travels in the scientific literature resulted in his being awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1853 and established his reputation as a geographer and explorer.
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 untill his death in 1911. They had no children.
Middle years
Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields of science, including geography, statistics, biology and anthropology. Much of this was influenced by and an outgrowth of his obsession with counting or measuring everything that he encountered. The result was a blizzard of discoveries and investigations as varied as detailed research into the perfect cup of tea and his discovery of the anti-cyclone. He became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presenting many papers on wide variety of topics at its meeings from 1858 to 1899. He was the general secretary from 1863 to 1867, president of the Geographical section in 1867 and 1872, and president of the Anthropological Section in 1877 and 1885.
Heredity, historiometry and eugenics
The event that changed his life and gave him a 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, and devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring its implications for human populations. He came to believe that similar methods could be of use in improving the human race, and set out to explore this idea in detail.
He became especially interested in the question of whether the qualities in a man that made for success and recognition was indeed hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives, than among the general population. He obtained his data from various biographical sources and compared the results that he tabulated in various ways. This pioneering work was described in detail in his book Hereditary Genius in 1869. He showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third. He took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities.
The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. To bolster these results, and to attempt to make a distinction between 'nature' and 'nurture' he devised a questionnaire that he sent out to 190 Fellows of the Royal Society. He tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents. He attempted to discover if their interest in science was "innate" or due to the encouragements of others. The studies were published as a book, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture in 1874. In the end, it did little to settle the nature versus nurture question, but it provided some fascinating data on the sociology of scientists of the time.
Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins. His method was to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments. He again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper "The History of Twins" in 1875. He concluded that the evidence rather favored the nature side of the nature versus nurture question.
Galton was the first to attempt to locate the 'particles' in animals that transmit hereditary characters. Darwin had proposed as part of his theory of pangenesis that these particles, which he called 'gemmules' moved throughout the body and were also responsible for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Galton, in consultation with Darwin, set out to see if they were transported in the blood. In a long series of experiments in 1869 to 1871, he transfused the blood between dissimilar breeds of rabbits, and examined the features of their offspring. He found no evidence of characters transmitted in the transfused blood. Galton also, presciently, rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Galton also devised a technique called composite photography which he believed could be used to establish racial and social 'types' which could aid the improvement of society.
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. He pointed out some of the dysgenic tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children. On the negative side, he could not see how moral persuasion among the unfit could be efficacious, and suggested only sterilization as a humane possibility.
His ideas would greatly influence similar movements in many other countries.
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 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. In the 1870s and 1880s he was a pioneer in the use of normal distribution to fit histograms of actual tabulated data. He invented the Quincunx, a pachinko-like device, also known as the bean machine, as a tool for demonstrating the law of error and the normal distribution. He also discovered the properties of the bivariate normal distribution and its relationship to regression analysis.
After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton introduced the concept of correlation in 1888. His statistical study of the probability of extinction of surnames led to the concept of Galton-Watson stochastic processes.
He also developed early theories of ranges of sound and hearing.
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. Galton wrote about the technique (inadvertently sparking a controversy between Herschel and Faulds that was to last until 1917), identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day. The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by William Herschel in India, but their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880.
Final years
In a final effort to reach a wider audience, Galton deviated from his usual scholarly literary style shortly before his death early in 1911. This change in style was an attempt to get his eugenic vision to “the less reachable section who read novels and only looked at picture pages of newspapers” Galton worked on his ‘novel’, entitled ‘The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere’ from May until December of 1910. He offered it to Methuen for publication and subsequently received word on 28 December 1910 that it had been rejected. Galton wrote to his niece that, due to Methuen’s refusal of the piece, it would be either “smothered or superseded”. His death which followed soon after in Haslemere, Surrey on 17 January 1911, prevented any further revisions or attempts to publish the work. Indeed, following destruction of the main manuscript and partial destruction of the only other copy, it seemed probable that Galton’s visions of a Eugenic Utopia, a fictional account of the application of his life’s work, would not be made known. (see [2])
Honors and impact
He received in 1854 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. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1856 and elected a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Club in the same year. He was knighted in 1909. 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. Psychologist Catherine M. Cox, noted for her psychometric studies of geniuses, stated that his I.Q. "could not be far from 200."
External links
- Template:Gutenberg author
- Galton's published work (including all major books and over 300 of his scientific papers)
- Portraits of Galton from the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom)
- The Galton laboratory homepage (originally The Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics) at University College London
References
- Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford University Press, New York, 2001). ISBN 0195143655
- Michael Bulmer, Francis Galton : Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). ISBN 0801874033de:Francis Galton
fr:Francis Galton is:Francis Galton it:Francis Galton he:פרנסיס גלטון nl:Francis Galton ja:フランシス・ゴルトン no:Francis Galton ru:Гальтон, Фрэнсис sk:Francis Galton sv:Francis Galton
