Replies

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.

English social scientist, an outspoken hereditarian and selectionist and (alone with his disciple Karl Pearson) a founder of biometrics. Galton conducted extensive statistical studies of heredity in humans, including the first major twin study (1883).

A virulent racist, he popularized the phrase "nature and nurture" from 1874 onward specifically so he could downplay the latter. He also coined the term "eugenics" (1883) and essentially founded the eugenics movement with arguments going back to 1865, although his ideas did not gain wide acceptance until the turn of the century, spurred on by the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance.

A first cousin of Darwin and a witness of the famous Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860, he was a staunch supporter of natural selection even at its lowest, late 19th-century ebb. Ironically, he argued that selection on minor variations was too weak to produce long-term evolutionary changes, which instead were due to occasional saltations.

Despite having read Galton's 1869 book, Darwin himself still took a dim view of the influence of heredity on human behavior in his The Descent of Man (1871). As a member of Murchison's Royal Geographical Society, Galton led a major expedition to south-central Africa in the 1850's. He became general secretary of the RGS in 1857, and also was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He also conducted research in meteorology. In his will, Galton endowed a chair called the Foundation Professor of Eugenics at the University of London specifically so Pearson could fill it.