Galton, Francis

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Galton, Francis 1822–1911

Francis Galton was born in Birmingham, England, on February 16, 1822 and he died in Surrey, England, on January 17, 1911. He was a founding figure in the field of mental testing and intelligence and in the pseudoscience of “proving” class and racial inferiorities. He also helped develop the racist theories of social Darwinism that led to nineteenth and twentieth century eugenics programs in Europe and North America. He is recognized in the discipline of psychology as a pioneer of standardized intelligence testing and of original anthropometric and sociological methods used to demonstrate the importance of heredity in human differences. In this area, he also helped develop an experimental research laboratory that led to the development of the subfield of experimental psychology.

Sir Francis Galton was influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, which led him to explore the relationship between intelligence and the evolution of humans. Following Darwin’s ideas about biological evolution of species, he added the social to the biological and developed a hierarchy of ranked races, nations, and classes. Through a simple rendering of evolutionary ideas into a social theory—known as “social Darwinism’’—Galton held that biological differences were predestined by genetics, with limited effects possible from environmental influence. Individual differences, he argued, are the result of two principle factors, environment and heredity, with heredity being by far the more important. It was a simple step from Galton’s social Darwinist theories to the eugenics movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that advocated the unnatural selection of the “fittest” individuals and groups to reproduce, while social engineering programs were established to discourage or prohibit “inferior” individuals from reproducing. It is an irony of history that Francis Galton—whose racist analysis has since been discredited—was knighted by the English crown in 1909 for his contributions, while Charles Darwin— whose works remain influential in the early twenty-first century—was not.

Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) is his classic work and represents a milestone in the history of racialist scholarship. Like Arthur Gobineau, whose Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) was published in four volumes from 1853 to 1855, Galton used racism as a major framework in asserting that there are higher and lower races. Galton graded men on a scale of genius from “A” to “G’’, with “G” being the highest grade. He found the greatest majority of humans were in the “mediocre classes’’—represented by the bulge in the “bell curve” he developed in relation to intelligence testing—while there were only a small number of men of great ability and an equally small number of mental defectives. Thus, he posited that the rarity of genius and the vast abundance of mediocrity was no accident, but due to natural, hereditary forces. Further, those at the “genius” level were not found randomly among all humans, but instead concentrated in the upper classes of northern Europeans.

According to Galton, classical Greece and the England of his day possessed the highest percentage of per capita geniuses of the first class, while the Negro race had failed to produce any man of genius in all of history (1869, pp. 325–337). For Galton, genius clustered in families, and no matter how rich the social and cultural environment, a genius could never be created out of a mediocre man. Indeed, he held that the success of some English families over generations proved his hypothesis that intelligence is inherited. Although Hereditary Genius represented unsound science with an a priori bias that intelligence is hereditary, it was a useful political tool for many, and the book was reprinted many times and was an inspiration to proponents of eugenics and social Darwinism well into the twentieth century.

Added to Galton’s testing and analysis of hereditary difference was his fear that the lower races and poorer classes were breeding at a faster rate than the upper classes and higher races. Fearing a “dysgenic” trend of future genetic inferiority, he coined the term eugenics, meaning “science of the well-born,” and advocated eugenic programs that would limit the number of individuals from “defective,” and “inferior” races and classes. Galton’s ideas are linked to the origins of the eugenics movement, which sought to improve the racial stock of humans through selective mating. Indeed, some eugenics groups called themselves “Galton Societies.” Thus, Galton’s Hereditary Genius lies at the base of much of the literature that makes a false correlation among race, class, and intelligence.

Galton introduced to science the idea of the “bell curve,” around which human intelligence can be measured and interpreted along a “normal distribution.” For Galton, human intelligence varied by individuals (from geniuses to the “feebleminded” and retarded) and by groups (from the highest genius [English noblemen] to the dullest [Negroes]) along a predictable bell curve of frequency distribution. It is noteworthy that the controversial 1994 work The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, was a revival of the theories of Galton. The book opens with a reverent bow to Galton, and the authors restate Galton’s idea that some people are smarter, positing the novel racist idea that East Asians (Japanese and Chinese) are more intelligent than whites.

Galton made a number of methodological contributions to the discipline of psychology, including pioneering the development, application, and analysis of tests demonstrating hereditary differences in ability. He assumed that human intelligence is innate and can be objectively measured though the administration of tests. His intelligence tests were mainly devoted to measurement of the acuity of the senses, and they were developed and administered at the anthropometric laboratory at his South Kensington Museum, where he tested his hypotheses regarding the influence of heredity on the characteristics of related persons, particularly parents and children, twins, and brothers and sisters. From his results, he persuaded a number of educational institutions in England to keep systematic anthropometric records on their students, thus establishing the precedent for the public application of racialist data in education. By these methods, Galton created the first systematic body of data on individual differences.

Galton devised simple tests for his anthropometric lab, many of which are still in use, some in their original forms. Examples include the “Galton bar” for measuring visual discrimination of length, the “Galton whistle” for determining the ability to hear the highest audible pitch, and a test measuring muscular strength using graduated weights in order to determine kinesthetic ability. Galton believed that sensory skill is a measure of intellect. He noted, for example, that extreme mental retardates tend to be defective in their ability to discriminate cold, heat, and pain. His association of reaction time with intelligence was established with the g-factor in IQ tests. In the 1890s, Galton’s reaction-time test was applied by R. Meade Bache to three groups by race: Caucasians, American Indians, and Negroes. Bache found that Caucasians had the slowest reaction times, American Indians had the fastest, and that Negroes were in between the two. However, with science having become thoroughly racialized, Bache’s analysis interpreted that rapid reaction time is inversely related to intelligence, so the slower Caucasians were actually deemed to be smarter.

Galton innovated the study of twins, believing that observing differences between fraternal and identical twins demonstrates the significance of heredity. Biologically identical twins are destined to be alike, even if they are reared apart, whereas fraternal twins are not necessarily similar even if they are reared together. The conclusion from twins and other Galtonian studies was that heredity is more important than environment. In this respect, he influenced the racialist work of Sir Cyril Burt (1883–1971) and Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), both of whom have since been discredited. Challengers of Galton, including Franz Boas (1858–1942), have emphasized the role of environmental factors, focusing the debate about race and intelligence around the relative importance of heredity and environment.

The mental tests that succeeded Galton’s reaction-time tests were originally developed by the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911), whose nonracialist interest in ability testing represented a stark contrast to Galton. Binet was unable to define or accurately measure what he called “general intelligence.” His more complex view of intelligence was more in tune with modern psychology, but he died before his view prevailed. His tests were grossly oversimplified by others and made into the first standardized intelligence tests, which were then graded according to an “intelligence quotient,” or “IQ.” “Mental age” was divided by the chronological age and multiplied by 100, with the net result being the intelligence quotient. This type of testing rested upon two basic premises: (1) intelligence can be measured objectively by tests yielding an Intelligence Quotient, or “IQ,” and (2) IQ is largely inherited, (Galton asserted that heredity accounted for 80% of performance; 60% has been alleged by Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve).

Galton pioneered the application of the rating-scale and questionnaire methods, as well as “free association tests.” He developed statistical methods for the analysis of individual differences, adapting techniques previously used only by mathematicians (such as the correlation coefficient analyzing the relationship between two variables). Thus, Galton was a founder of quantitative methods in psychology. The chair in eugenics at the University of London was first held by his protégé Karl Pearson (1857– 1936), who also founded the university’s Department of Applied Statistics, reflecting the influence of his mentor.

Galton’s role in pioneering tests of ability and intelligence is still highly regarded in the field of educational and psychological testing, while his class-biased and racially motivated interpretations have yet to be thoroughly critiqued. Since the beginning of intelligence testing, calculating and ranking differences by race has been a key feature of this enterprise. It remains so to this day, along with other measures of academic potential, such as the common measure of scholastic achievement in the United States, the SATs.

SEE ALSO Eugenics, History of.