90 Facts About Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI, was an English polymath in the Victorian era.

Francis Galton was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism.

Francis Galton developed the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean.

Francis Galton was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.

Francis Galton was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883, and coined the phrase "nature versus nurture".

Francis Galton devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science.

Francis Galton conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for.

Francis Galton invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.

Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin.

Francis Galton's father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel Galton, Jr.

Francis Galton attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, but chafed at the narrow classical curriculum and left at 16.

Francis Galton's parents pressed him to enter the medical profession, and he studied for two years at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College London Medical School.

Francis Galton followed this up with mathematical studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1840 to early 1844.

Francis Galton wrote a book on his experience, "Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa".

Francis Galton was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic survey of the region.

Francis Galton proceeded to write the best-selling The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move, which went through many editions and is still in print.

Francis Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields, including meteorology, statistics, psychology, biology, and criminology.

Francis Galton prepared the first weather map published in The Times, now a standard feature in newspapers worldwide.

Francis Galton became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presenting many papers on a wide variety of topics at its meetings from 1858 to 1899.

Francis Galton was the general secretary from 1863 to 1867, president of the Geographical section in 1867 and 1872, and president of the Anthropological Section in 1877 and 1885.

Francis Galton was active on the council of the Royal Geographical Society for over forty years, in various committees of the Royal Society, and on the Meteorological Council.

James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wilhelm Wundt who had been reading Francis Galton's articles, decided he wanted to study under him.

Francis Galton eventually built a professional relationship with Galton, measuring subjects and working together on research.

In 1888, Francis Galton established a lab in the science galleries of the South Kensington Museum.

Francis Galton came to be gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on "Variation under Domestication", concerning animal breeding.

Francis Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted in The Origin of Species, although he returned to it in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, drawing on his cousin's work in the intervening period.

Francis Galton established a research program which embraced multiple aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height; from facial images to fingerprint patterns.

Francis Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men.

Francis Galton obtained extensive data from a broad range of biographical sources which he tabulated and compared in various ways.

Francis Galton took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities.

Francis Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins.

Francis Galton's method envisaged testing to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments.

Francis Galton again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper The history of twins in 1875.

Francis Galton concluded that the evidence favored nature rather than nurture.

Francis Galton proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate the effects of heredity and environment.

Francis Galton recognized that cultural circumstances influenced the capability of a civilization's citizens, and their reproductive success.

Francis Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

Francis Galton believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged via provision of monetary incentives.

Francis Galton pointed out some of the tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children, which he thought were dysgenic.

Francis Galton advocated encouraging eugenic marriages by supplying able couples with incentives to have children.

On 29 October 1901, Francis Galton chose to address eugenic issues when he delivered the second Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Francis Galton wrote that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.

Francis Galton demonstrated this using a new version of quincunx, adding chutes to the apparatus to represent reversion.

On Friday 19 February 1877 Francis Galton gave a lecture entitled Typical Laws of Heredity at the Royal Institution in London.

In 1875, Francis Galton started growing sweet peas, and addressed the Royal Institution on his findings on 9 February 1877.

Francis Galton found that each group of progeny seeds followed a normal curve, and the curves were equally disperse.

Francis Galton called this reversion, as every progeny group was distributed at a value that was closer to the population average than the parent.

In doing so, Francis Galton demonstrated that there was variability among each of the families, yet the families combined to produce a stable, normally distributed population.

Francis Galton was able to further his notion of regression by collecting and analyzing data on human stature.

Francis Galton determined that the regression coefficient did not ensure population stability by chance, but rather that the regression coefficient, conditional variance, and population were interdependent quantities related by a simple equation.

Francis Galton viewed reversion as a spring, that when stretched, would return the distribution of traits back to the normal distribution.

Francis Galton concluded that evolution would have to occur via discontinuous steps, as reversion would neutralize any incremental steps.

Francis Galton conducted wide-ranging inquiries into heredity which led him to challenge Charles Darwin's hypothesis of pangenesis.

Francis Galton found no evidence of characters transmitted in the transfused blood.

Darwin challenged the validity of Francis Galton's experiment, giving his reasons in an article published in Nature where he wrote:.

Francis Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and was an early proponent of "hard heredity" through selection alone.

Francis Galton came close to rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory of inheritance, but was prevented from making the final breakthrough in this regard because of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete, traits.

Francis Galton went on to found the biometric approach to the study of heredity, distinguished by its use of statistical techniques to study continuous traits and population-scale aspects of heredity.

Francis Galton took advantage of this opportunity to set up his anthropometric laboratory.

The patrons would then be given a souvenir containing all their biological data, while Francis Galton would keep a copy for future statistical research.

The exhibit at the health exhibition allowed Francis Galton to collect a large amount of raw data from which to conduct further comparative studies.

Francis Galton had 9,337 respondents, each measured in 17 categories, creating a rather comprehensive statistical database.

Francis Galton tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents.

Francis Galton attempted to discover whether their interest in science was 'innate' or due to the encouragements of others.

Sir Francis Galton was the first scientist to recognise what is known as the lexical hypothesis.

Francis Galton stated that "the middlemost estimate expresses the vox populi, every other estimate being condemned as too low or too high by a majority of the voters", and reported this value as 1,207 pounds.

Francis Galton discovered the properties of the bivariate normal distribution and its relationship to correlation and regression analysis.

Francis Galton invented the use of the regression line and for the choice of r to represent the correlation coefficient.

Francis Galton was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of sweet peas.

Francis Galton first observed the phenomenon in the context of simple linear regression of data points.

Francis Galton developed the following model: pellets fall through a quincunx or "bean machine" forming a normal distribution centered directly under their entrance point.

Francis Galton went beyond measurement and summary to attempt to explain the phenomena he observed.

Francis Galton made a beauty map of Britain, based on a secret grading of the local women on a scale from attractive to repulsive.

Francis Galton was interested in measuring humans in every way possible.

Francis Galton suggested that individual differences in general ability are reflected in performance on relatively simple sensory capacities and in speed of reaction to a stimulus, variables that could be objectively measured by tests of sensory discrimination and reaction time.

Francis Galton measured how quickly people reacted which he later linked to internal wiring which ultimately limited intelligence ability.

Francis Galton devised a technique called "composite portraiture" to create an average face.

Jacobs asked Francis Galton to create a composite photograph of a Jewish type.

Francis Galton hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces.

Francis Galton was introduced to the field by his half-cousin Charles Darwin, who was a friend of Faulds's, and he went on to create the first scientific footing for the study although Francis Galton did not ever give credit that the original idea was not his.

Francis Galton wrote about the technique, identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day.

Francis Galton described and classified them into eight broad categories: 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.

Francis Galton's unpublished notebooks show that this was an expansion of material he had been composing since at least 1901.

Francis Galton offered it to Methuen for publication, but they showed little enthusiasm.

Francis Galton wrote to his niece that it should be either "smothered or superseded".

Francis Galton's niece appears to have burnt most of the novel, offended by the love scenes, but large fragments survived, and it was published online by University College, London.

Francis Galton is buried in the family tomb in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels, in the village of Claverdon, Warwickshire.

In January 1853, Francis Galton met Louisa Jane Butler at his neighbour's home and they were married on 1 August 1853.

Francis Galton received in 1853 the Founder's Medal, the highest award of the Royal Geographical Society, for his explorations and map-making of southwest Africa.

Francis Galton was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club in 1855 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1860.