Francis Galton
From Freepedia
Sir Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911) British anthropologist, eugenicist, explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was the first to apply statistical methods to scientific inquiry, was a pioneer in eugenics, an investigator of the human mind and founder of psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties), devised a method for classifying fingerprints useful in forensics, introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works (English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, 1874) and for his anthropological studies (Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883), and was the initiator of scientific meteorology: he invented the weather map, set up the theory of anticyclones and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on an European scale [1]. For all of his achievements, it is interesting to note that psychologist Catherine M. Cox, noted for her psychometric studies of geniuses, stated that his I.Q. "could not be far from 200."
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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. He was advised at a young age by Charles Darwin that he ought to "read Mathematics like a house on fire," and was very much influenced by Darwin's ideas of natural selection when they came into print.
Galton had a somewhat directionless youth. Born into a family sufficiently wealthy as to require him not to work, he took a gentlemanly interest in science. He failed to graduate from University of Cambridge. In the 1850's he travelled in Africa and then wrote several books on his experiences, including The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move.
Middle years
The event that changed his life and gave him a direction was the publication by his cousin Charles of The Origin of Species in 1859. Galton was gripped by the work and devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring its implications.
Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields of science, from geography, statistics, biology to anthropology. Much of this was the result 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.
Galton also devised techniques such as composite photography in order to establish racial and social 'types' which could aid the management of society. He was a proponent of the idea of selective breeding among humans in order to halt what he saw as the decline of the British race. His ideas would go on to influence the sterilisation movements in countries such as Sweden, the United States and Germany. His work on eugenics was later adopted by the Nazi party as a justification for the systematic elimination of the Jews and other races.
Statistics, correlation, historiometry, eugenics
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. Galton's 1869 work, Hereditary Genius, popularised historiometry and also formed the beginning of his thoughts on eugenics and heredity. (Galton invented the term eugenics). In statistics, Galton was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean in the 1870s and 1880s and showed that the normal distribution was itself normal. 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.
Galton invented the Quincunx, also known as the bean machine as a tool for demonstrating the law of error and the normal distribution. He also invented the questionnaire, regression analysis, composite photography (layering images upon one another to create what he considered a 'mean' image), the correlation, and twin studies.
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.
External links
- Works by Francis Galton at Project Gutenberg
- 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 0801874033
Categories: 1822 births | 1911 deaths | Darwin -- Wedgwood family | Fellows of the Royal Society | British anthropologists | British eugenicists | British geographers | Meteorologists | Polymaths | Psychometricians | Statisticians
