Francis Galton

Francis Galton (born February 16, 1822, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England—died January 17, 1911, Grayshott House, Haslemere, Surrey) was an English explorer, anthropologist, and eugenicist known for his pioneering studies of human intelligence.[1] Francis Galton was an English polymath, explorer, anthropologist and statistician. He invented the concept of "regression to the mean" and is famous -- or infamous -- as "the father of eugenics".[4]

Early Life and Education

Francis Galton was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England, on the 18th February 1822, the youngest of seven children. His father Samuel Tertius Galton was a successful businessman and his mother was Francis Anne Viollette Darwin.[3] Francis was youngest of his parents seven children having three older brothers and three older sisters.[4]

Galton's early education was provided by his sister Adele—his elder by twelve years—who took a special interest in his education. Before Francis enrolled in school for formal education, Adele taught him to read English, Greek, and Latin and taught him simple arithmetic.[2] He learned to read before the age of three and became competent in Latin and mathematics by age five.[10]

In 1836, at the age of fourteen, Galton was enrolled in King Edward's School in Birmingham, where the curriculum was primarily Latin and Greek.[2] But he had little use for the conventional classical and religious teaching he received in school and church.[1] In Memories of My Life (1908), Galton wrote that while at the school he craved "an abundance of good English reading, well-taught mathematics, and solid science."[2]

Galton's parents had planned that he should study medicine, and a tour of medical institutions on the Continent in his teens—an unusual experience for a student of his age—was followed by training in hospitals in Birmingham and London.[1] After attending King Edward's School for two years, Galton became a pupil at the Birmingham General Hospital to prepare for a career in medicine. For a young boy of sixteen, he was immediately given a position of much responsibility in the dispensary.[2]

But at this time, in Galton's words, "a passion for travel seized me as if I had been a migratory bird." A visit to the University of Giessen, Germany, to attend lectures on chemistry was broken off in favour of travel in southeastern Europe. From Vienna he made his way through Constanza, Constantinople (later Istanbul), Smyrna, and Athens, and he brought back from the caves of Adelsberg (present-day Postojna, Slovenia) specimens of a blind amphibian named Proteus—the first to reach England.[1]

On his return Galton went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, as a result of overwork, he broke down in his third year. But he recovered quickly on changing his mode of life, as he did from similar attacks later. After leaving Cambridge without taking a degree, Galton continued his medical studies in London.[1] But before they were completed, his father died, leaving him "a sufficient fortune to make me independent of the medical profession."[1]

Relationship to Erasmus Darwin

Interestingly, Francis's maternal grandfather was physician Erasmus Darwin and the famous Charles Darwin was a also grandson of Erasmus, making Francis and Charles Darwin first cousins.[3] Charles Darwin was Francis Galton's half-cousin, sharing the same grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.[11]

Erasmus Darwin (born Dec. 12, 1731, Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died April 18, 1802, Breadsall Priory, Derby, Derbyshire) was a British physician, poet, and botanist noted for his republican politics and materialistic theory of evolution. Although today he is best known as the grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin and of biologist Sir Francis Galton, Erasmus Darwin was an important figure of the Enlightenment in his own right.[14]

In 1781 Erasmus married a young widow, Elizabeth Pole, who insisted that he move to her home in Derby, where he started writing scientific poetry and textbooks. Together they had seven children; their eldest daughter was the mother of Francis Galton, who in the late 19th century would found the science of eugenics.[14] Several years after his first wife's death, Erasmus Darwin married Elizabeth Collier Sacheveral-Pole, the widow of an elderly colonel. Their daughter, Violetta, married Samuel Tertius Galton. Francis Galton, the youngest of their eight children, was born in 1822, 13 years after his cousin Charles Darwin.[13]

Erasmus had been a successful doctor and something of a polymath himself, co-founding the Lunar Club with Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley, among others.[11] His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a founder of the Lunar Society, whose membership included many of the great scientific thinkers of his day, including Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, and Joseph Priestly.[16]

Key Influences and Mentors

The Darwin and Galton family had some contact over the years, but it was not until Darwin and Galton were both mature working scientists that any serious contact took place. Darwin had initiated the contact, after he had read Galton's Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, around 1853. Galton later read The Origin of Species, which he would later call a revolutionary effect on his own thinking, and a regular correspondence followed until Darwin's death.[11]

Strongly influenced by Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), Galton developed his own theories on inherited traits.[6] The publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the species" in 1859 appears to have been influential on Galton who interests changed to hereditary around that time.[3]

Professional Development

African Exploration

Galton travelled up the Nile to Khartoum with a group of friends and also visited the Holy Land and Syria. For five years from 1845 to 1850 he split his time between London and Scotland and took up a sporting life. In 1850, he began an expedition to south west Africa with the approval of the Royal Geographical Society. This was an area virtually unknown to Europeans at that time. His findings were published in his 1853 book "Tropical South Africa" and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society the same year.[3]

Galton's maps and observations and descriptions of the native peoples of these regions brought him great acclaim, including a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. He published on a book on his exploration, entitled Tropical South Africa (1853). Two years later, Galton offered his advice for other would-be explorers in The Art of Travel: Or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (1855).[6]

Scientific Contributions

They dealt with many diverse subjects, including the use of fingerprints for personal identification, the correlational calculus (a branch of applied statistics)—in both of which Galton was a pioneer—twins, blood transfusions, criminality, the art of travel in undeveloped countries, and meteorology.[1]

#### Statistics and Measurement

In around 1875 he was experimenting with sweet-pea seeds. He used 100 seeds of each of seven different diameters and constructed a two-way plot of diameters of the original seeds against the diameters of the seeds of the next generation. He noticed that the median diameter of the offspring of the large seeds were less than that of their parents while the median diameter of the offspring of the small seeds were greater than that of their parents.[4]

Galton was an innovator in the field of statistics, the first to recognize the "wisdom of the crowd." He once attended a livestock fair where villagers were asked to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated. When Galton looked at their estimates, he found that while almost all the guesses were wrong, both the middle guess and the average of the guesses were almost exactly correct. From such observations he helped to develop the concepts of mean and variation, leading him to formulate the essential statistical concept of standard deviation.[22]

#### Fingerprinting

He was able to show that the fingerprint pattern remained constant as the person grew older, and he devised characteristics of the fingerprints which could be used as unique identifiers of the person based on grouping the patterns into arches, loops, and whorls. On the topic he published Finger prints (1893), Blurred finger prints (1893), and Finger print directory (1895). His identification system became the basis for the classification of Sir Edward R Henry, who later became chief commissioner of the London metropolitan police. The Galton-Henry system of fingerprint classification was published in June 1900, and began to be used at Scotland Yard in 1901 as an identifier on criminal records. It was soon used throughout the world in criminal investigations.[4]

Galton was the first to place the study of fingerprints on a scientific basis, collecting over 8,000 sets and performing an exhaustive study of the ridge patterns. His research established that fingerprints are both unique to an individual and permanent over a person's lifetime. In his influential 1892 book Finger Prints, Galton developed a tripartite classification system based on the three main patterns: arch, loop, and whorl.[24]

#### Heredity and Eugenics

His first publication, founding the field of behavioral genetics, was "Hereditary talent and character", which appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in 1865. He stated that "talent and peculiarities of character are found in the children, when they have existed in either of the parents, to an extent beyond all question greater than in the children of ordinary persons" ... Galton published his book "Hereditary Genius" in 1869 in which he studied genius and greatness. He proposed encouraging talented young men and women to have children earlier on in life, thus improving the human race.[3]

In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton coined the term eugenics, which would come to be his legacy.[7] Galton coined the word eugenics to denote scientific endeavours to increase the proportion of persons with better than average genetic endowment through selective mating of marriage partners.[1]

Personal Life

On his return from Africa, on 1 August 1853, Galton married Louisa Jane Butler. During their marriage, the Galtons had no children.[3] Galton made no further overseas expeditions, the trip to Africa having permanently affected his health.[3]

Galton's family life was happy, and he gratefully acknowledged that he owed much to his father and mother.[1] Supported by his inheritance, Galton was free to live the life of a gentleman scientist, pursuing experiments and observing the natural world from the comfort of his home. He was chiefly engaged in measuring and quantifying everything he observed.[7]

Legacy and Impact

He was knighted in 1909.[1] Galton died on January 17, 1911, in Haslemere, England, at the age of 88.[6] Under the terms of his will, a eugenics chair was established at the University of London.[1]

Galton's work in statistics and quantification of data alone would have made his life's work important to the progress of science. However, it is as the father of eugenics that he is remembered. His contributions to the ideas of human breeding for social improvement were profoundly influential on biologists, social activists, and psychologists until World War II.[7]

While Galton is primarily remembered today, 110 years after his death, as the father of the shameful pseudoscience of eugenics, during his life he was considered one of the most influential thinkers of his day. He made seminal contributions in fields as diverse as statistics, geology, meteorology, anthropology, psychology, biology and psychometrics.[22]

Galton's theories spread rapidly, giving rise to eugenics movements that gained significant traction in the United States and Europe during the early 20th century. This philosophical framework provided the intellectual justification for catastrophic ethical failures, including the forced sterilization of over 60,000 people in the United States, often targeting the poor and minorities. The movement's association with scientific racism and its ultimate adoption by the Nazi regime further cemented eugenics as a symbol of pseudo-scientific abuse and authoritarian coercion.[24]

Today Galton's star has fallen. This past summer, University College London announced that it was removing his name from a building, for instance, with his role as the father of eugenics far outweighing his other scientific contributions.[22] His development of the correlation coefficient and the concept of regression marked the dawn of the statistical era of scientific inquiry and revolutionized the way scientists analyze their experimental results. Work on the inheritance of psychological characteristics, the use of twin studies, and the use and development of statistical methods made Galton the founder of modern psychology.[2]