Galton, Francis

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GALTON, FRANCIS

(1822–1911)

Sir Francis Galton, scientific polymath, eugenicist, hereditarian and pioneer of statistical methodology, was born in Birmingham, England, the third son of the wealthy banker Samuel Tertius Galton, and the grandson of doctor and poet Erasmus Darwin. Galton began his scientific career, at the age of 16, as a medical student at the Birmingham Free Hospital. From there he moved to King's College London to study medicine, and to Trinity College Cambridge in 1840 to read mathematics. Achieving only a pass degree at Cambridge, due to the first of several mental breakdowns, Galton reluctantly persisted with his medical training. But, coming into a fortune on his father's death in 1844, he abandoned medicine. In 1850, after several idle years, Galton financed and led an exploratory expedition to Southwest Africa, returning in 1852. Lionized by the scientific community, he gradually established himself as one of Victorian Britain's most respected scientists.

Galton's professional energies were mostly devoted to exploring human heredity and developing means by which to study it. And, as heredity could only systematically be investigated at the population level, he made many practical contributions to population studies. Having read, and been profoundly influenced by, English naturalist Charles Darwin's (his half-cousin) The Origin of Species (1859), a decade later Galton published Hereditary Genius (1869). In this unequivocally Darwinist work, Galton collated hundreds of eminent pedigrees in an attempt to prove that high intellectual ability is largely a function of hereditary endowment. On this basis, he proposed measures to ensure that the more intelligent members of society achieved the highest rates of fertility. (Galton's own marriage, however, was childless.) Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883,in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, derived from the Greek eugenes meaning "good in stock."

Galton was among the first scientists to apply mathematical tools to the study of the inheritance of human mental and bodily traits. He began with rather rudimentary methods. However, it was his consistent fascination with variation around the population mean that later enabled him to develop the fundamental statistical techniques of both correlation and regression–procedures later systematized and more fully explicated by Galton's admirer and first biographer, the statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936). From 1904, Galton privately financed research fellowships in statistics and eugenics at University College London, and he left money for their continuation in his will.

Galton's interest in heredity was practical as well as numerical. Collaborating with Darwin, he tested the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics by transfusing blood among different breeds of rabbit. Galton then bred several generations of sweet-pea plants in an attempt to establish the mechanics of heredity; from his results he formulated the ancestral law of heredity, a model of inheritance later superceded by Mendelian genetics. The same fascination about heredity also stimulated his research on fingerprints (and their use in criminology), unconscious mental phenomena, variation in stature and strength, and the supposed physical indices of criminality. In addition, symptomatic of his polymathic interests, Galton made significant contributions to geography and meteorology; in 1862, he named and described the "anti-cyclone."

Galton was honored with numerous prestigious awards and was knighted in 1909. As a scientist he was idiosyncratic, utterly dedicated and, though frequently naive, often strikingly effective. His maxim was "Whenever you can, count," and his research suggests a man with an almost obsessive compulsion to do so. At the personal level, Galton suffered from an unusually low self-esteem and recurrent mental health problems. Yet, he also displayed a willingness to scandalize popular opinion, and he pushed the materialism of his fellow protagonists of Darwinism further than most would have dared.

Galton's eugenic ideas stimulated demographic research in both Europe and America. But it was his contributions to statistical methodology, made in the context of his hereditarian pursuits, that make Galton such an important figure in the history of population studies.