Please delete the post if it isn't acceptable.
Born: February 16, 1822 in Sparkbrook, England
Died: January, 17 1911 in Grayshott House, England
An explorer and anthropologist, Francis Galton is known for his pioneering studies of human intelligence. He devoted the latter part of his life to eugenics, i.e. improving the physical and mental makeup of the human species by selected parenthood.
Although weak in mathematics his ideas strongly influenced the development of statistics particularly his proof that a normal mixture of normal distributions is itself normal. Another of his major findings was reversion. This was his formulation of regression and its link to the bivariate normal distribution.
He also made important contributions to the fields of meteorology, anthropometry, and physical anthropology. Galton was an indefatigable explorer and an investigator of human intelligence.
Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, was convinced that pre-eminence in various fields was due almost entirely to hereditary factors. He opposed those who claimed intelligence or character were determined by environmental factors. He inquired into racial differences, something almost unacceptable today, and was one of the first to employ questionnaire and survey methods, which he used to investigate mental imagery in different groups of people.
His work led him to advocate breeding restrictions.
Galton was knighted in 1909.
If we could only find a way to breed Democrats out of existence....
Was he the one that had himself stuffed and stipulated that he continue to attend board meetings after his death?
(CO, I thought this would be a biography that might intrigue you.)
I found Francis Galton's life history to be disturbingly depressing. While reading it I was continually reminded of the saying that "a mind is a terrible thing to waste". Here was a man whose mind showed early on that it held the greatest potential, yet through a lack of personal discipline and formal education, his intellectual growth became stunted and sidetracked into frivolous pursuits. I was left wondering whether the author was trying to lay the grounds for a diagnosis of a manic-depressive individual.
The irony is that in his pursuit of eugenics, it would appear that Galton failed to recognize that his own intellectual short comings that would place him decidedly on history's reproductive "B" list, not for any lack of intelligence, but rather for his lack of ability to apply it.
Although the biography only touched on it lightly, it seems that his rejection of religion was an early and fatal flaw in his developing a strong moral base from which he could have dealt with an overcome those personal flaws. All in all, his life seems to me to be a prime example of the failure of the "Age of Reason".
--Boot Hill
Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an English scientist who studied heredity and intelligence. He was the person who coined the word eugenics, using Greek words to express what was originally a Greek concept.
He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was Francis Galton's maternal grandfather and also Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather. Erasmus Darwin developed a theory of evolution that Charles Darwin later expanded and refined.
Galton defined his new word this way: "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally." But he wanted more than a little study. In 1905, he wrote about the three stages of eugenics ã first an academic matter, then a practical policy, and finally "it must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion."
In Memories of My Life, Galton said that the publication of Darwin's book on evolution stirred a rebellion against religious dogma: "The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science."
He became an openly anti-Christian bigot. For example, he wrote about prayer, dismissing the idea that God would ever listen to anyone's prayers for good weather, basing his argument on mockery, not data: "I do not propose any special inquiry whether the general laws of physical nature are ever changed in response to prayer: whether, for instance, success has attended the occasional prayers in the Liturgy when they have been used for rain, for fair weather, for the stilling of the sea in a storm, or for the abatement of a pestilence. The modern feeling of this country is so opposed to a belief in the occasional suspension of the general laws of nature, that most English readers would smile at such an investigation." Is English scorn a reliable measure of truth?