Francis Galton

English eugenicist

• Born: February 16, 1822
• Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire (now in West Midlands), England
• Died: January 17, 1911
• Place of death: Haslemere, Surrey, England

Galton is credited with the development of modern statistical methods that have made immense contributions in all areas of science, and he also laid the foundation for modern psychology and for the eugenics movement.

Early Life

Francis Galton was the son of Samuel Tertius Galton and Violetta Darwin Galton, the daughter of Erasmus Darwin. Thus, Francis Galton and the great naturalist Charles Darwin were cousins. 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. 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. 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.”

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. He prepared infusions, decoctions, tinctures, and extracts. In Memories of My Life, his early medical experiences are emotionally described. Galton’s inquisitiveness led him to sample the various medicines in the dispensary, stopping when croton oil, with its emetic effects, temporarily cured his investigative tendencies. In 1839, he continued his formal theoretical medical training at King’s College, London.

In 1840, Galton left medical study at King’s College and enrolled at Cambridge (Trinity College) to study mathematics. A nervous breakdown forced him to miss a term and abandon his plans to receive honors in mathematics. Instead, he finished studies for a medical degree. Galton’s stay at Trinity College proved to be influential as he met, socialized with, and was stimulated by many prominent educators.

Undoubtedly inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Galton had a propensity for travel, of which his first taste came during the summer of 1840. In Memories of My Life, Galton said, “in the Spring of 1840 a passion for travel seized me as if I had been a migratory bird.” The “passion” took him to various countries on the Continent.

In 1844, after the death of his father, who left him independently wealthy, Galton “abandoned all thought of becoming a physician.” With no apparent sense of vocation, he traveled for several years.

Life’s Work

Having abandoned his medical studies and being independently wealthy, Galton resumed his interest in traveling, climbing, and mountaineering. He traveled to Egypt and Spain in 1845 and under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society visited Southeast Africa from 1850 to 1852. His travels won for him the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society and established his position in the scientific world. His account of his travels to Southeast Africa was published in 1853 as Tropical South Africa . He published in 1855 Art of Travel , which became the most popular of all publications of the Royal Geographical Society. Galton eventually became editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. His work for the Royal Geographical Society secured his election as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1856.

Through his association with the Royal Geographical Society, Galton became a member of the Managing Committee of the Kew Observatory in 1858. His work at the observatory included the establishment of a means for standardizing sextants and other angular instruments and verifying the accuracy of thermometers. He also developed a photographic method used to record readings from a barometer, discovered anticyclones, took part in the construction of weather charts for publication in daily newspapers, and made several minor inventions. He became chairman of the observatory in 1889 and held that post until 1901.

During the 1860’s, while still at Cambridge, Galton noticed that academic talent ran in families, and he became interested in heredity, especially of human characteristics. This interest was sparked by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Galton stated in Memories of My Life that On the Origin of Species “made a marked epoch in my own mental development.”

Galton first outlined his ideas on human heredity in the June and August, 1865, issues of Macmillan magazine in an article titled “Hereditary Talent and Character” but elaborated on them and developed them more fully in a book, published in 1869 and titled Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences . Galton’s purpose as stated in the introduction of the book was to show “that a man’s natural abilities are derived from inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the forms and physical features of the whole organic world.”

In his book, Galton describes his method based on the normal distribution of classifying people by ability. He outlines the kinships of judges, statesmen, scientists, poets, and so on. His conclusions about the power of heredity are clear: “I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the community, and of the professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.” Galton believed that human intelligence and behavior were under the same influences as any physical trait.

Galton concluded that if one can breed horses with “peculiar powers of running… so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” Galton, believing that “heredity was a far more powerful agent in human development than nurture,” decided to explore “the range of human faculty… in order to ascertain the degree to which heredity might… modify the human race.”

Galton realized that the development and spread of his ideas on heredity were hampered by a lack of knowledge of a hereditary mechanism. In 1871, he succeeded in establishing cross-circulation between two breeds of rabbits in an effort to study Darwin’s gemmule theory of inheritance. Neither breed was altered by the experiment, casting doubt on a gemmulelike theory. In later studies, Galton came close to discovering the principles of the continuity of the germ plasm and corroborating Gregor Mendel’s principle of segregation.

Galton’s own theory of inheritance was a biometrical one:

The laws of heredity are concerned only with deviations from the median.… It supposes all variability are a result of different and equally probable combinations of a multitude of small independent causes.

This work led to his development of the correlation coefficient.

In 1872, Alphonse de Candolle published a response to Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, in which de Candolle concluded that environment and not heredity was more important in determining mental character. In an effort to determine the relative importance of nature and nurture, Galton sent questionnaires to 180 selected fellows of the Royal Society. The questionnaires inquired about parents, physique, comparable success of relatives, energy, memory, mechanical aptitude, religious beliefs, and origin of the interest in science. The results of the questionnaires formed the foundation for English Men of Science (1874). Although one could interpret Galton’s results in favor of an environmental influence, he said that “the results of the inquiry showed how largely the aptitude for science was an inborn and not an acquired gift, and therefore apt to be hereditary.”

Realizing the wealth of information on the nature/nurture debate to be gained from the study of twins, Galton located and questioned several pairs of twins. The results, which supported Galton’s suspicions about the power of heredity, were published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute in 1875 and 1876. Galton concluded:

The impression that all this evidence leaves on the mind is one of some wonder whether nurture can do anything at all. There is no escape from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons of the same rank of society and in the same country.

In his continuing quest to obtain hereditary data on humans, Galton published the Record of Family Faculties in 1884. The Record of Family Faculties was a list of questions about topics ranging from mental powers to temperament. Prizes were awarded to those who provided the most complete answers. The information from the questionnaires was used for Natural Inheritance , published in 1889.

Galton’s interest in human characteristics provided the stimulus for the opening in 1885 of an anthropometric laboratory at the South Kensington Museum, where data on height, weight, sight, hearing, and so on, were collected. The laboratory remained open for eight years. His studies at the laboratory on children’s ability to remember number and letter spans were noticed by Alfred Binet and incorporated into Binet’s intelligence test. One emphasis of the laboratory was in the use of fingerprints as a means of identification, a technique pioneered by Galton. Finger-Prints was published in 1893.

In Galton’s attempts to discover the mechanisms involved with hereditary phenomena, he studied, as suggested by Darwin, inheritance in sweet peas. The results of the sweet-pea experiments and subsequent studies on humans showed a direct correlation between parent and offspring for the various characteristics he studied. The studies directly led to the discovery of the correlation coefficient and the concept of regression. Many of his results were published in Natural Inheritance, the publication of which led to the formation of the biometric school of heredity, a direct rival of the Mendelian school. Galton’s work on the inheritance of human characteristics secured his election as president of the Anthropological Society in 1885. Six years later, Galton helped launch Biometrika , of which he became a consulting editor. The journal was intended as a forum for the publication of biological studies of a statistical nature.

Galton is best known for his work in eugenics, an interest that directly evolved from his work on the inheritance of human characteristics. In Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), he defined eugenics as

the science of improving stock which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.

Galton’s conviction that intelligence and virtually all other behavioral characteristics were inherited led him to believe that social ills could be cured by controlling the reproduction of undesirables (negative eugenics) and encouraging the breeding of superior individuals (positive eugenics) to the end of breeding a better race. It was clear to Galton that the breeding of criminals, the insane, the feebleminded, and paupers should be limited, by compulsory means if necessary. In the Huxley Lecture delivered in 1900, Galton stated that doing so “would abolish a source of suffering and misery for a future generation.” Again, his ideas attracted little attention.

In May, 1904, Galton lectured before the Sociological Society. In that lecture, he defined eugenics as

the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.… What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providently, quickly and kindly.

Late in 1904, Galton gave the University of London five hundred pounds per year for three years to set up a eugenics laboratory. Galton acted as superintendent. Monies were also given for a research fellow and a research assistant. The laboratory was called the Eugenics Record Office; the lab’s official definition of eugenics was “the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the social qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” The Eugenics Education Society was founded three years later, and Galton was appointed honorary president.

Galton was knighted in 1909. He died on January 17, 1911, in Haslemere, Surrey, England. On his death, he bequeathed forty-five thousand pounds to the University of London to endow a Chair of Eugenics.

Significance

Francis Galton’s work had a profound impact on scientific research. 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. Galton is best known for his work in eugenics. He was convinced that heredity was the most important factor in determining psychological characteristics. There is little doubt that he was influenced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Galton saw that Darwin’s theory easily applied to humankind and that the process of natural selection could be accelerated by human intervention. At first, his eugenic proposals attracted little attention and few followers.

After the rediscovery of Mendel’s law in 1900, Galton’s eugenic ideas began to take hold. His ideas spread throughout Europe and to the Americas and quickly found influence in the United States. The eugenics movement was seen as a large-scale social-hygiene program aimed at curing social ills. In the United States, the movement culminated with the passing in 1924 of an immigration restriction law. The rise of Nazism clearly demonstrated how eugenics could be misused by those in authority. Adolf Hitler delivered the final death knell to eugenics as an organized movement.

Bibliography

Brookes, Martin. Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Comprehensive biography written by a former evolutionary biologist who worked at the University College of London’s Galton Laboratory. Brookes is impressed by the breadth of Galton’s achievements, but condemns Galton’s racist ideas, Victorian prejudices, and failure to understand the statistical ideas he devised.

Bulmer, Michael. Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Bulmer, a biometrician, describes Galton’s life and ideas about the use of biometrical methods in genetics.

Forrest, D. W. Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius. New York: Taplinger, 1974. Biography containing many letters written to family members and colleagues.

Galton, Francis. Memories of My Life. London: Methuen, 1908. An account of Galton’s personal and scientific life from his own perspective. There are some errors that have probably resulted from Galton’s failing memory.

Gillham, Nicholas Wright. A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Biography describing the full range of Galton’s accomplishments, placing his achievements in relation to Victorian social ideas and Darwinism.

Haller, Mark. Eugenics: Hereditary Attitudes in American Thought. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. An excellent account of the origin and development of the eugenics movement in both Great Britain and the United States.

Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. An excellent study of the development of statistical thinking among nineteenth century social scientists, biologists, and physicists; includes extensive discussion of Galton. The author is a historian, and his account demands little mathematical background.

Stigler, Stephen M. The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. A magisterial history of statistics, from its origins in the seventeenth century to the full-fledged development of statistical methods at the beginning of the twentieth century. In contrast to Porter (see above), Stigler writes for the mathematically knowledgeable reader, and his engagingly written book is dense with equations, formulas, and statistical tables. Includes a biographical sketch of Galton and thorough discussion of his probability machine. Illustrated.