Sir Francis Galton, FRS was an English Victorian
progressive, polymath, psychologist, anthropologist,
eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer,
inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist,
psychometrician, and statistician. He was
knighted in 1909.
Galton produced over 340 papers and books.
He also created the statistical concept of
correlation and widely promoted regression
toward the mean. He was the first to apply
statistical methods to the study of human
differences and inheritance of intelligence,
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 itself and the phrase "nature versus
nurture". His book Hereditary Genius was the
first social scientific attempt to study genius
and greatness.
As an investigator of the human mind, he founded
psychometrics and differential psychology
and the lexical hypothesis of personality.
He devised a method for classifying fingerprints
that proved useful in forensic science. He
also conducted research on the power of prayer,
concluding it had none by its null effects
on the longevity of those prayed for.
As the initiator of scientific meteorology,
he devised the first 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. He
also invented the Galton Whistle for testing
differential hearing ability.
He was cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton and
half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
Biography
Early life
Galton was born at "The Larches", a large
house in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham,
England, built on the site of "Fair Hill",
the former home of Joseph Priestley, which
the botanist William Withering had renamed.
He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing
the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin. His
father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel
"John" Galton. The Galtons were famous and
highly successful Quaker gun-manufacturers
and bankers, while the Darwins were distinguished
in medicine and science.
Both families boasted Fellows of the Royal
Society and members who loved to invent in
their spare time. Both Erasmus Darwin and
Samuel Galton were founding members of the
famous Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose
members included Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood,
Priestley, Edgeworth, and other distinguished
scientists and industrialists. Likewise, both
families were known for their literary talent:
Erasmus Darwin composed lengthy technical
treatises in verse; Galton's aunt Mary Anne
Galton wrote on aesthetics and religion, and
her notable autobiography detailed the unique
environment of her childhood populated by
Lunar Society members.
Galton was by many accounts a child prodigy –
he was reading by the age of two; at age five
he knew some Greek, Latin and long division,
and by the age of six he had moved on to adult
books, including Shakespeare for pleasure,
and poetry, which he quoted at length. Later
in life, Galton would propose a connection
between genius and insanity based on his own
experience. He stated, "Men who leave their
mark on the world are very often those who,
being gifted and full of nervous power, are
at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant
idea, and are therefore within a measurable
distance of insanity"
Galton attended King Edward's School, Birmingham,
but chafed at the narrow classical curriculum
and left at 16. His parents pressed him to
enter the medical profession, and he studied
for two years at Birmingham General Hospital
and King's College London Medical School.
He followed this up with mathematical studies
at Trinity College, University of Cambridge,
from 1840 to early 1844.
According to the records of the United Grand
Lodge of England, it was in February 1844
that Galton became a freemason at the so-called
Scientific lodge, held at the Red Lion Inn
in Cambridge, progressing through the three
masonic degrees as follows: Apprentice, 5
February 1844; Fellow Craft, 11 March 1844;
Master Mason, 13 May 1844. A curious note
in the record states: "Francis Galton Trinity
College student, gained his certificate 13
March 1845". One of Galton's masonic certificates
from Scientific lodge can be found among his
papers at University College, London.
A severe nervous breakdown altered Galton's
original intention to try for honours. He
elected instead to take a "poll" B.A. degree,
like his half-cousin Charles Darwin. He then
briefly resumed his medical studies. The death
of his father in 1844 had left him financially
independent but emotionally destitute, and
he terminated his medical studies entirely,
turning to foreign travel, sport and technical
invention.
In his early years Galton was an enthusiastic
traveller, and made a notable solo trip through
Eastern Europe to Constantinople, before going
up to Cambridge. In 1845 and 1846 he went
to Egypt and travelled down the Nile to Khartoum
in the Sudan, and from there to Beirut, Damascus
and down the Jordan.
In 1850 he joined the Royal Geographical Society,
and over the next two years mounted a long
and difficult expedition into then little-known
South West Africa. He wrote a successful book
on his experience, "Narrative of an Explorer
in Tropical South Africa". He was awarded
the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal
in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French
Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic
survey of the region. This established his
reputation as a geographer and explorer. He
proceeded to write the best-selling The Art
of Travel, a handbook of practical advice
for the Victorian on the move, which went
through many editions and is still in print.
In January 1853 Galton met Louisa Jane Butler
at his neighbour's home and they were married
on 1 August 1853. The union of 43 years proved
childless.
Middle years
Galton was a polymath who made important contributions
in many fields of science, including meteorology,
statistics, psychology, biology, and criminology.
Much of this was influenced by his penchant
for counting or measuring. Galton prepared
the first weather map published in The Times,
now a standard feature in newspapers worldwide.
He became very active in the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, presenting
many papers on a wide variety of topics at
its meetings 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. He was active on the council
of the Royal Geographical Society for over
forty years, in various committees of the
Royal Society, and on the Meteorological Council.
James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wilhelm
Wundt who had been reading Galton's articles,
decided he wanted to study under him. He eventually
built a professional relationship with Galton,
measuring subjects and working together on
research.
In 1888, Galton established a lab in the science
galleries of the South Kensington Museum.
In Galton's lab, participants could be measured
to gain knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.
Galton also used these data for his own research.
He would typically charge people a small fee
for his services.
During this time, Galton wrote a controversial
letter to the Times titled 'Africa for the
Chinese', where he argued that the Chinese,
as a race capable of high civilisation and
only temporarily stunted by the recent failures
of Chinese dynasties, should be encouraged
to immigrate to Africa and displace the supposedly
inferior aboriginal blacks.
Heredity and eugenics
The publication by his cousin Charles Darwin
of The Origin of Species in 1859 was an event
that changed Galton's life. He came to be
gripped by the work, especially the first
chapter on "Variation under Domestication,"
concerning the breeding of domestic animals.
Galton devoted much of the rest of his life
to exploring variation in human populations
and its implications, at which Darwin had
only hinted. In so doing, he established a
research program which embraced multiple aspects
of human variation, from mental characteristics
to height; from facial images to fingerprint
patterns. This required inventing novel measures
of traits, devising large-scale collection
of data using those measures, and in the end,
the discovery of new statistical techniques
for describing and understanding the data.
Galton was interested at first in the question
of whether human ability was 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. To test
this, he invented the methods of historiometry.
Galton obtained extensive data from a broad
range of biographical sources which he tabulated
and compared in various ways. This pioneering
work was described in detail in his book Hereditary
Genius in 1869. Here 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.
Galton recognised the limitations of his methods
in these two works, and believed the question
could be better studied by comparisons of
twins. His method envisaged testing 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. In
so doing he anticipated the modern field of
behaviour genetics, which relies heavily on
twin studies. He concluded that the evidence
favoured nature rather than nurture. He also
proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial
adoption studies, to separate the effects
of heredity and environment.
Galton recognised that cultural circumstances
influenced the capability of a civilisation's
citizens, and their reproductive success.
In Hereditary Genius, he envisaged a situation
conducive to resilient and enduring civilisation
as follows:
The best form of civilization in respect to
the improvement of the race, would be one
in which society was not costly; where incomes
were chiefly derived from professional sources,
and not much through inheritance; where every
lad had a chance of showing his abilities,
and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve
a first-class education and entrance into
professional life, by the liberal help of
the exhibitions and scholarships which he
had gained in his early youth; where marriage
was held in as high honour as in ancient Jewish
times; where the pride of race was encouraged;
where the weak could find a welcome and a
refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods,
and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants
and refugees from other lands were invited
and welcomed, and their descendants naturalised.
Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883
and set down many of his observations and
conclusions in a book, Inquiries into 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 tendencies in British society, such as
the late marriages of eminent people, and
the paucity of their children, which he thought
were dysgenic. He advocated encouraging eugenic
marriages by supplying able couples with incentives
to have children. On 29 October 1901, Galton
chose to address eugenic issues when he delivered
the second Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological
Institute
The Eugenics Review, the journal of the Eugenics
Education Society, commenced publication in
1909. Galton, the Honorary President of the
society, wrote the foreword for the first
volume. The First International Congress of
Eugenics was held in July 1912. Winston Churchill
and Carls Elliot were among the attendees.
Empirical test of pangenesis and Lamarckism
Galton conducted wide-ranging inquiries into
heredity which led him to challenge Charles
Darwin's hypothetical theory of pangenesis.
Darwin had proposed as part of this hypothesis
that certain 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.
Darwin challenged the validity of Galton's
experiment, giving his reasons in an article
published in Nature where he wrote:
Now, in the chapter on Pangenesis in my Variation
of Animals and Plants under Domestication
I have not said one word about the blood,
or about any fluid proper to any circulating
system. It is, indeed, obvious that the presence
of gemmules in the blood can form no necessary
part of my hypothesis; for I refer in illustration
of it to the lowest animals, such as the Protozoa,
which do not possess blood or any vessels;
and I refer to plants in which the fluid,
when present in the vessels, cannot be considered
as true blood." He goes on to admit: "Nevertheless,
when I first heard of Mr. Galton's experiments,
I did not sufficiently reflect on the subject,
and saw not the difficulty of believing in
the presence of gemmules in the blood.
Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, and
was an early proponent of "hard heredity"
through selection alone. He came close to
rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory
of inheritance, but was prevented from making
the final breakthrough in this regard because
of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete,
traits. He went on to found the biometric
approach to the study of heredity, distinguished
by its use of statistical techniques to study
continuous traits and population-scale aspects
of heredity.
This approach was later taken up enthusiastically
by Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon; together,
they founded the highly influential journal
Biometrika in 1901. The statistical techniques
that Galton invented and phenomena he established
formed the basis of the biometric approach
and are now essential tools in all the social
sciences.
Innovations in statistics and psychological
theory
Historiometry
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 whether
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 promoted the nature versus nurture
question, though it did not settle it, and
provided some fascinating data on the sociology
of scientists of the time.
The Lexical Hypothesis
Sir Francis was the first scientist to recognise
what is now known as the Lexical hypothesis.
This is the idea that the most salient and
socially relevant personality differences
in people's lives will eventually become encoded
into language. The hypothesis further suggests
that by sampling language, it is possible
to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human
personality traits.
The questionnaire
Galton's inquiries into the mind involved
detailed recording of people's subjective
accounts of whether and how their minds dealt
with phenomena such as mental imagery. To
better elicit this information, he pioneered
the use of the questionnaire. In one study,
he asked his fellow members of the Royal Society
of London to describe mental images that they
experienced. In another, he collected in-depth
surveys from eminent scientists for a work
examining the effects of nature and nurture
on the propensity toward scientific thinking.
Variance and standard deviation
Core to any statistical analysis is the concept
that measurements vary: they have both a central
tendency, or mean, and a spread around this
central value, or variance. In the late 1860s,
Galton conceived of a measure to quantify
normal variation: the standard deviation.
Galton was a keen observer. In 1906, visiting
a livestock fair, he stumbled upon an intriguing
contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers
were invited to guess the animal's weight
after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly
800 participated, but not one person hit the
exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Galton stated that
"the middlemost estimate expresses the vox
populi, every other estimate being condemned
as too low or too high by a majority of the
voters", and calculated this value as 1,207
pounds. To his surprise, this was within 0.8%
of the weight measured by the judges. Soon
afterwards, he acknowledged that the mean
of the guesses, at 1,197 pounds, was even
more accurate.
The same year, Galton suggested in a letter
to the journal Nature a better method of cutting
a round cake by avoiding making radial incisions.
Experimental derivation of the normal distribution
Studying variation, Galton 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.
Bivariate normal distribution
He also discovered the properties of the bivariate
normal distribution and its relationship to
regression analysis.
Correlation and regression
In 1846, the French physicist Auguste Bravais
first developed what would become the correlation
coefficient. After examining forearm and height
measurements, Galton independently rediscovered
the concept of correlation in 1888 and demonstrated
its application in the study of heredity,
anthropology, and psychology. Galton's later
statistical study of the probability of extinction
of surnames led to the concept of Galton–Watson
stochastic processes. This is now a core of
modern statistics and regression.
Galton invented the use of the regression
line, and 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. He is responsible for the choice
of r to represent the correlation coefficient.
In the 1870s and 1880s he was a pioneer in
the use of normal distribution to fit histograms
of actual tabulated data.
Theories of perception
Galton went beyond measurement and summary
to attempt to explain the phenomena he observed.
Among such developments, he proposed an early
theory of ranges of sound and hearing, and
collected large quantities of anthropometric
data from the public through his popular and
long-running Anthropometric Laboratory, which
he established in 1884, and where he studied
over 9,000 people. It was not until 1985 that
these data were analysed in their entirety.
Differential psychology
Galton's study of human abilities ultimately
led to the foundation of differential psychology
and the formulation of the first mental tests.
He was interested in measuring humans in every
way possible. This included measuring their
ability to make sensory discrimination which
he assumed was linked to intellectual prowess.
Galton suggested that individual differences
in general ability are reﬂected in performance
on relatively simple sensory capacities and
in speed of reaction to a stimulus, variables
that could be objectively measured by tests
of sensory discrimination and reaction time.
He also measured how quickly people reacted
which he later linked to internal wiring which
ultimately limited intelligence ability. Throughout
his research Galton assumed that people who
reacted faster were more intelligent than
others.
Composite photography
Galton also devised a technique called "composite
portraiture" to create an average face. In
the 1990s, a hundred years after his discovery,
much psychological research has examined the
attractiveness of these faces, an aspect that
Galton had remarked on in his original lecture.
Others, including Sigmund Freud in his work
on dreams, picked up Galton's suggestion that
these composites might represent a useful
metaphor for an Ideal type or a concept of
a "natural kind"—such as Jewish men, criminals,
patients with tuberculosis, etc.—onto the
same photographic plate, thereby yielding
a blended whole, or "composite", that he hoped
could generalise the facial appearance of
his subject into an "average" or "central
type"..
This work began in the 1880s while the Jewish
scholar Joseph Jacobs studied anthropology
and statistics with Francis Galton. Jacobs
asked Galton to create a composite photograph
of a Jewish type. One of Jacobs' first publications
that used Galton's composite imagery was "The
Jewish Type, and Galton's Composite Photographs,"
Photographic News, 29,: 268–269.
Galton hoped his technique would aid medical
diagnosis, and even criminology through the
identification of typical criminal faces.
However, his technique did not prove useful
and fell into disuse, although after much
work on it including by photographers Lewis
Hine and John L. Lovell and Arthur Batut.
Fingerprints
In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three
books, Galton estimated the probability of
two persons having the same fingerprint and
studied the heritability and racial differences
in fingerprints. He wrote about the technique,
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 Sir William James Herschel in India, and
their potential use in forensic work was first
proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton
was the first to place the study on a scientific
footing, which assisted its acceptance by
the courts. Galton pointed out that there
were specific types of fingerprint patterns.
He described and classified them into eight
broad categories: 1: plain arch, 2: tented
arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop,
5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7:
plain whorl, and 8: accidental.
Final years
In an effort to reach a wider audience, Galton
worked on a novel entitled Kantsaywhere from
May until December 1910. The novel described
a utopia organised by a eugenic religion,
designed to breed fitter and smarter humans.
His unpublished notebooks show that this was
an expansion of material he had been composing
since at least 1901. He offered it to Methuen
for publication, but they showed little enthusiasm.
Galton wrote to his niece that it should be
either "smothered or superseded". His niece
appears to have burnt most of the novel, offended
by the love scenes, but large fragments survived.
Honours and impact
Over the course of his career Galton received
many major awards, including the Copley Medal
of the Royal Society. He received in 1853
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 elected a member
of the prestigious Athenaeum Club in 1855
and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1860. His autobiography also lists the following:
Silver Medal, French Geographical Society
Gold Medal of the Royal Society
Officier de l'Instruction Publique, France
D.C.L. Oxford
Sc.D., Cambridge
Huxley Medal, Anthropological Institute
Elected Hon. Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge
Darwin Medal, Royal Society
Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace
Medal
Galton 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,
in four parts, after his death. The eminent
psychometrician Lewis Terman estimated that
his childhood IQ was on the order of 200,
based on the fact that he consistently performed
mentally at roughly twice his chronological
age.
The flowering plant genus Galtonia was named
in his honour.
Major works
Galton, F.. Hereditary Genius. London: Macmillan.
Galton, F. Inquiries into Human Faculty and
Its Development. London: J.M. Dent & Company
See also
A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, a play
about Galton
Darwin–Wedgwood family
Efficacy of prayer
Eugenics in the United States
Historiometry
Racial hygiene
References
Further reading
Brookes, Martin. Extreme Measures: The Dark
Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton.
Bloomsbury. 
Bulmer, Michael. Francis Galton: Pioneer of
Heredity and Biometry. Johns Hopkins University
Press. ISBN 0-8018-7403-3. 
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. Sir Francis Galton and
the Study of Heredity in the Nineteenth Century.
Garland. Originally Cowan's PhD dissertation,
Johns Hopkins University,. 
Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen "Nordic Nightmares,"
pp. 257–325 in Typecasting: On the Arts
and Sciences of Human Inequality, Seven Stories
Press. ISBN 978-1-58322-735-0
Forrest, D.W. Francis Galton: The Life and
Work of a Victorian Genius. Taplinger. ISBN 0-8008-2682-5. 
Galton, Francis. Memories of My Life:. New
York: E. P. Dutton and Company. 
Gillham, Nicholas Wright. A Life of Sir Francis
Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth
of Eugenics, Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-514365-5
Pearson, Karl. "The life, letters and labours
of Francis Galton". 
Daniëlle Posthuma, Eco J. C. De Geus, Wim
F. C. Baaré, Hilleke E. Hulshoff Pol, René
S. Kahn & Dorret I. Boomsma. "The association
between brain volume and intelligence is of
genetic origin". Nature Neuroscience 5: 83–84.
doi:10.1038/nn0202-83. PMID 11818967. 
Quinche, Nicolas, Crime, Science et Identité.
Anthologie des textes fondateurs de la criminalistique
européenne. Genève: Slatkine, 2006, 368p.,
passim.
Stigler, S. M.. "Darwin, Galton and the Statistical
Enlightenment". Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society: Series A 173: 469–482. doi:10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00643.x. 
External links
Francis Galton at Find a Grave
Galton's Complete Works at Galton.org.
Works by Francis Galton at Project Gutenberg
Works by Francis Galton at LibriVox
The Galton Machine or Board demonstrating
the normal distribution on YouTube
Portraits of Galton from the National Portrait
Gallery
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Francis
Galton", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive,
University of St Andrews .
Biography and bibliography in the Virtual
Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for
the History of Science
History and Mathematics
Human Memory – University of Amsterdam
website with test based on the work of Galton
An 8-foot-tall Probability Machine comparing
stock market returns to the randomness of
the beans dropping through the quincunx pattern.
on YouTube from Index Funds Advisors IFA.com
Catalogue of the Galton papers held at UCL
Archives
"Composite Portraits", by Francis Galton,
1878.
"Enquiries into Human Faculty and its Development",
book by Francis Galton, 1883.
The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake on YouTube,
demonstrated by Alex Bellos
