Francis Galton

GALTON, Francis (1822–1911), outstanding English scientist, biologist, founder of eugenics (see), and one of the founders of biometrics (see Biometry). His father was distinguished by a great love for calculations and measurements, while his mother was the gifted daughter of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. At the age of 16, Galton entered a hospital to study medicine, and later attended the University of London. After graduating from the university, Galton traveled through Egypt, Palestine, and South Africa. He worked in the fields of ethnography, anthropology, meteorology (he discovered anticyclones), physiology and psychology (Galton's whistle), etc. He invented composite portraiture, i.e., collective portraits superimposed on one another to reveal common features. The system for studying and classifying fingerprint impressions developed by Galton and applied in criminal investigation is also widely known (“Finger prints,” London, 1892; see Dactyloscopy). Galton's primary focus, however, was on questions of heredity. Having studied the biographies of outstanding men of Cambridge, he published the book “Hereditary Genius” (1869) and “English Men of Science” (London, 1874). In accordance with his mathematical inclinations in the study of heredity, Galton followed a statistical-mathematical path. Having collected extensive data on the height of parents and children, he applied the method of compiling correlation tables and calculating tables to analyze the collected data. Thus he established “Galton's law,” or the “law of regression,” according to which a deviation from the mean value is inherited by offspring not in its entirety, but partially, so that children turn out to deviate from the mean value, for example, by ²/₃ of the amount by which their parents deviated. After the development of Mendelism (see), it was clarified that this is a purely statistical rather than a biological law. Through the mathematical development of other questions of variability and heredity, Galton, together with Karl Pearson, created an entire biometric school. In the doctrine of heredity, Galton owns the so-called “stirp theory,” which is close to Weismann's germ-plasm theory (see Weismann theory). The study of human heredity led Galton to the idea of the practical application of the science of heredity to the improvement of the human race, parallel to similar work on domestic animals and plants. He named this direction eugenics in his book “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development” (London, 1883). He outlined the tasks and methods of eugenics in the book “Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics” (Oxford, 1907). Galton also founded a society for the study of eugenic problems. Framing the problem of improving the hereditary properties of human beings is Galton's indisputable merit, despite the fact that class psychology led him to an insufficient appreciation of social factors, as well as to unacceptable conclusions about what should be considered “good”; thus, he used the amount of a person's annual income as a measure of human “quality,” calculating how many times more valuable a child of wealthy parents was compared to a child of a proletarian. Galton died in 1911, bequeathing a large sum of capital to establish a chair and laboratory of eugenics at the University of London.