Born on February 16, 1822, in Birmingham, England, Francis Galton was the youngest of nine children of Samuel Tertius, a banker, and Frances Anne Violetta Galton. At the age of 16, Galton enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine and mathematics. He spent the summer of 1840 exploring Constantinople, Athens, Venice, and Milan. Upon his return to school, he focused his attention fully on medicine but quickly grew disillusioned. When his father died in October 1844, he inherited a substantial amount of money, allowing him to abandon his medical studies.
In October 1845, Galton left England to travel around the Middle East and Africa for a year. He ventured down the Nile on a barge, rode horses, oxen, and camels, and took copious notes and measurements everywhere he went before returning in November 1846. In 1850 he planned a trip in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society to South Africa. From this journey, Galton produced two travel books. The first book, The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853), a classic travel narrative, was written from an imperialist British perspective and focused on exciting adventures of the heroic explorer. Galton's second travel book, The Art of Travel; or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (1855), is a handbook of practical advice for the traveler. Galton received acclaim for his explorations, earning the Geographical Society's Gold Medal in 1856.
Having satisfied his travel urges, Galton turned his attention to other endeavors. He undertook a wide range of studies, made numerous discoveries, and designed various inventions. For example, his study of meteorology led to the publication of Meteorographica (1863) in which the anticyclone was explained for the first time. (Air circulates clockwise around a center of high barometric in the northern hemisphere whereas it circulates counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.) He developed a high frequency whistle to study the hearing of zoo animals, a device cleverly planted in his cane that he could unobtrusively activate from the handle. Perhaps two of his most lasting inventions were the classification of fingerprints for individual identification, a system left basically unchanged to this day, and the invention of a machine that made composite pictures, a precursor to the modern computerized method of removing noise from photographs.
Galton is best remembered for the work he did in his latter years on the topic of heredity, found primarily in Natural Inheritance (1889). Between 1888 and 1894, Galton gathered measurements on over 7,500 individuals ranging in age from 12 to 80 to study the role of inheritance in abilities. Focusing keenly on measurement, he contributed most importantly to the formulation of the theories of regression and correlation, the basis of biometry, which is the statistical analysis of biological phenomena. He noted that children of individuals who deviated from the norm of the general population also deviated from the norm in the same direction but to a lesser extent. If the parent deviated by x, then the offspring would deviate in the same manner as kx (0 < k < 1), with the k being the regression coefficient. Correlation marks the degree of relationship between two individuals of separate generations. Heredity influence is measured on a graduated scale in which parents contribute one-quarter each, grandparents contribute one-sixteenth each, and so on.
A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton wholeheartedly supported Darwin's theory of evolution. Although Galton did not agree with Darwin on every matter, his admiration for his cousin was unwavering. In the analysis of his study of heredity, Galton created the science of eugenics, which he defined as the science of improving the inherited abilities of the population by giving what he considered the suitable races the best chance of survival. To this end, he proposed the need for a state eugenics record office, in which extensive genealogical work on families would be stored. Families would be rated as (a) gifted, (b) capable, (c) average, or (d) degenerate. Women from categories (a) and (b) would be given incentives to marry and produce children. On the other end of the scale, those deemed to be feeble-minded, repeat criminal offenders, or mentally ill should be prevented from creating offspring. In short, Galton proposed replacing Darwin's natural selection with a type of controlled artificial selection. His major works on eugenics were Hereditary Genius (1869) and English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874).
In 1901, Galton founded the journal Biometrika to support his scientific interests, and in 1903, he opened the Eugenics Laboratory in the University of London. He spent his last years in ill health and died on January 17, 1911. Maligned by some observers of his lifetime achievements for his blatant racist format, others defend him as a product of his time who made considerable contributions to science.
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