Both families had Fellows of the Royal Society and members who loved to invent in their spare time. He was cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton and half-cousin of Charles Darwin. The Galtons were Quaker gun-manufacturers and bankers, while the Darwins were involved in medicine and science. His father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel Galton, Jr. He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin.
Galton was born at "The Larches", a large house in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, England, built on the site of "Fair Hill", the former home of Joseph Priestley, which the botanist William Withering had renamed. He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability. His quest for the scientific principles of diverse phenomena extended even to the optimal method for making tea.Īs the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. His book Hereditary Genius 1869 was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.Īs an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics the science of measuring mental faculties and differential psychology, as well as the lexical hypothesis of personality. He was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883, and also coined the phrase "nature versus nurture". He 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. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. Galton produced over 340 papers and books. Sir Francis Galton was an English Victorian era statistician, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. Poor humanity! I often feel that the tableland of sanity upon which most of us dwell, is small in area, with unfenced precipices on every side, over any one of which we may fall.
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