Francis Galton

1822-1911 · British · Differential Psychology and Eugenics

Whenever you can, count.

Francis Galton was a Victorian polymath — explorer, meteorologist, statistician, and the founder of eugenics — who set out to bring the measuring rod and the calculus of probability to the study of human beings. A younger half-cousin of Charles Darwin, he read the *Origin of Species* as a summons: if variation and inheritance governed the bodily form of animals, then they governed the mental and moral qualities of men, and these too could be counted, correlated, and improved.

Topics Francis Galton addresses

• eugenics
• hereditary genius
• nature and nurture
• regression toward the mean
• correlation and co-relation
• the law of error and the normal distribution
• anthropometry
• mental imagery and the breakfast-table survey
• composite portraiture
• the comparative worth of different races
• the measurement of natural ability
• the twin study
• the questionnaire method
• fingerprint identification
• statistical study of heredity
• the anthropometric laboratory
• positive eugenics and marriage
• the inheritance of talent and character
• biometry
• reversion and the ancestral type
• the efficacy of prayer
• individual differences
• genius and eminence
• the wisdom of the crowd (vox populi)

Converse with Francis Galton on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Francis Galton's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.