Francis Galton

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Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton [ ˈfɹɑːnsɪs ˈɡɔːltən ] (born February 16, 1822 in Sparkbrook , Birmingham , † January 17, 1911 in Haslemere , Surrey ) was a British naturalist and writer. Galton is considered to be one of the fathers of eugenics .

He made a name for himself in various disciplines through his versatility. He worked as a geographer and Africa researcher, developed the first weather map as a meteorologist, among other things, and dealt with inheritance theory , in particular with the inheritance of intelligence and talent , with his work Hereditary Genius from 1869 being noticed in large parts of the intellectual world. According to his friend Karl Pearson , "the improvement of the human race" was his goal. In connection with his investigations he introduced various statistical methods, e.g. B. coined the term regression (including regression towards the middle ) in 1889 while studying heredity and together with Pearson used the term correlation coefficient for the first time . In addition to his prominent role in the development of eugenics , which he developed as a research area and semantically as a term, Galton is also considered the father of dactyloscopy , a co-founder of differential psychology and - together with Wilhelm Wundt  - experimental psychology . He is also the developer and namesake of the Galton board , a model for demonstrating probability distributions, and the Galton whistle , an instrument for generating extremely high tones.

In total, he wrote over 340 articles and books.

He was knighted in 1909 and was - like his cousin Charles Darwin  - a grandson of Erasmus Darwin .

Life

Childhood and Adolescence (1822–1838)

Francis Galton was born on February 16, 1822 on his parents' estate in Larches near Sparkbrook , Birmingham . He was the ninth and last child of his father, Samuel Tertius Galton , a son of Samuel John Galton , and his mother, Frances Anne Violetta, a daughter of Erasmus Darwin , with whom he had the same grandfather as Charles Darwin . The Galtons were primarily successful arms makers and bankers belonging to the Quaker religious community , while the Darwins were dominated by respected physicians and scientists.

His older siblings, especially his sisters, had loved looking after little Francis. According to his sister Elisabeth Anne (1808–1906), her mother even had to watch the clock so that everyone could look after the boy for the same amount of time. It may also be due to this care, which was also expressed in the teaching of speaking, reading, arithmetic and writing, that Francis was able to read all capital letters at the age of 12 months and the others after 18 months. At the age of two and a half he was able to read books on his own, by the age of four he had already mastered many Latin and French vocabulary, was able to divide and multiply, and by the age of six was already reading works by Shakespeare and other adult literature.

At the age of five Galton came to a school near his parents' estate, where he distinguished himself for his achievements, at eight and a half years he was sent to a boarding school in Boulogne-sur-Mer . Here he was first placed in a higher class in which his classmates were six to seven years older than him. When it turned out that he could not keep up with their knowledge of the ancient languages, he was transferred back to a lower class. When he was ten, he moved to a private school in Kenilworth , which had only six students and where his natural history interests were greatly encouraged. On the other hand, Galton commented on the time in King Edward's School in Birmingham, which he attended between the ages of 13 and 16½, with the sentence "I learned nothing ...". By far the largest role at this school was played by ancient language teaching and explicitly Latin grammar, whereas Galton was more interested in the natural sciences, technical developments and English literature.

Medical studies (1838–1844)

That Francis Galton should become a doctor was above all the wish of his mother, whose father Erasmus Darwin and her half-brother Robert Darwin had made respected doctors. After taking a study tour of Europe in 1838, he began the first stage of medical training at Birmingham General Hospital in the autumn of that year. In addition to accompanying the doctors during their home visits and emergencies, Galton's strong scientific interest stood out here. So he used his activity for systematic experiments and self-experiments, among other things he tried out any remedies on himself and went through the list of drugs alphabetically. However, when he had almost reached the end of 'C' with the highly irritating croton oil , he abandoned this method.

After a brief interlude at King's College in London from October 1839, where he received awards for his achievements in many areas, Galton matriculated at Trinity College in Cambridge . His ambition here was less focused on learning medical skills than on completing the math exams with honors. However, on the one hand his health and on the other hand his broad spectrum of interests, which he did not want to focus solely on mathematics, thwarted his plans.

In general, Francis Galton had often struggled with health and psychosomatic problems during his medical studies, which possibly also stemmed from the fact that he could not identify with the life path of a doctor and had only studied medicine because his parents wanted to. Conventional career striving and even striving for knowledge, which would later appear to him to be the ultimate goal of mankind, was vehemently criticized in poems written during his student days.

In October 1844, chance came to his aid. When his father died that month, he inherited a great fortune and was no longer dependent on a profession. He left the university, like his cousin Charles Darwin a few years earlier, with a Bachelor of Arts degree .

Research trips (1845–1851 / 55)

In 1845 and 1846, Francis Galton visited Egypt and drove along the Nile to Khartoum in Sudan . From there he traveled to Beirut , Damascus and finally along the Jordan . In the following three years after his return he enjoyed the independent life of a wealthy gentleman and spent the time sailing, fishing and hunting in different regions of England.

After joining the Royal Geographical Society , he embarked on a carefully planned research trip to South West Africa in April 1850, which he financed himself. He was accompanied by the Anglo-Swedish researcher Charles John Andersson , who was to stay longer in the area. During these trips he explored and mapped Damaraland and Ovamboland and later wrote of his travels: "I have seen enough wild races to obtain so much material that I can think about it for the rest of my life" ("I saw enough of savage races "to give me material to think about all the rest of my life" ( Times , Dec. 1, 1886)).

After his return in 1851 he published his report Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa , which was noticed not only in Great Britain and for which he received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the silver medal of the French Geographic Society.

Building on his reputation as a geographer and explorer, he wrote the bestseller The Art of Travel in 1855 , a guide for travelers.

Publications and developments (1851 / 55–1909)

In 1853 Francis Galton married Louisa Butler and in 1857 they moved with her to south Kensington , a borough of London , where he would live for the rest of his life. While the marriage remained childless, he made a name for himself in various scientific fields. He became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science , serving as its General Secretary from 1863 to 1867, President of the Department of Geography from 1867 to 1872, and President of the Department of Anthropology from 1877 to 1885. In 1883 he founded the Galton Laboratory , which combined mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics under one roof.

meteorology

Galton was the first to identify high pressure areas and introduced the use of maps showing a region's air pressure. In his book Meteorographica from 1863, weather data was systematically collected, analyzed and evaluated for the first time . He was the first to publish a weather map in the Times on April 1, 1875 (although it still showed the previous day's weather).

Eugenics and race theory

With the publication of the work Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle of Life by his cousin Charles Darwin in 1859, Francis Galton's life took a new direction. Inspired by this work, he dealt with the basics of heredity . He was the first to apply empirical methods to the inheritance of intellectual properties , especially gifted people . His most famous work, Hereditary Genius (1869), can be considered a forerunner of behavioral genetics .

He also transferred his supposed knowledge of the inheritance of traits to the human mind and introduced the term eugenics , by which he understood a doctrine that aims to increase the proportion of positively assessed human genes through “good breeding ” .

Galton argued that all differences between peoples were inevitably genetic. The members of a "lower race" raised by whites retained "a wild, indomitable restlessness" that was "innate to savages".

“The Negro born in the United States today shares the same natural characteristics as his distant cousin born in Africa; the fact that he was transplanted did not change his nature. "

In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton discussed the possibility of "improving the breed". He hoped for a civilization "where pride of the race would be encouraged". At the same time, Galton stated that "there is a largely completely unreasonable sentimentality towards the gradual extinction of a lower race". He explains one possible approach:

“A nation's ability to racially improve depends on its ability to increase the productivity of its best genetics. This is far more important than suppressing the production of the worst. "

Galton endowed a professorship in eugenics, which was filled in 1911 at Galton's request by his intellectual heir, Karl Pearson .

Domestication

Galton was also interested in ways to domesticate animals - that is, tame them and breed them according to certain selection criteria. He found that almost all domestic animals - such as dogs, sheep, cattle, goats or horses - were domesticated in the prehistory of humans, while in historical times practically no other animals were added. To date, no elephants, zebras or cheetahs have been domesticated. “It seems that every wild animal has had its chance to be domesticated, with a small number ... domesticated a long time ago, but the rest of those who sometimes lacked a tiny detail are destined to be eternally wild . ” Galton suspected that the early peoples already had a precise knowledge of which large animals could be domesticated at all and which could not.

psychology

Galton is also considered to be the founder of differential psychology, which refers to the differences between people on a non-general level, whereby he developed test procedures for measuring psychological characteristics.

He was the first scientist to study the word association experiment, which he carried out several times on himself, using 75 different words that he had written on a card a few days earlier. During the experiment, he then turned over a card and used a stopwatch to measure his reaction time from the moment of the first eye contact to the formation of the first word association. Although he recorded his word associations together with the reaction times, he never published the full text, which is immediately understandable in view of the importance he attached to his experiment.

"They lay bare the foundations of a man's thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world."

"They reveal the fundamentals of a person's thoughts with remarkable clarity and depict the anatomy of his mind more vividly and truthfully than he would probably like to show the world."

- F. Galton : Psychometric Experiments , 1879

Galton's word association experiment was later adopted or further developed by , among others, Wundt , Kraepelin , Ebbinghaus (1885) and Jung and Riklin (1904).

In 1884 Galton was the first to formulate the sedimentation hypothesis in the beginning, an important assumption about the connection between language (and the terms it contains) and personality traits.

Dactyloscopy

Francis Galton established dactyloscopic methods scientifically after Henry Faulds and William James Herschel had made suggestions for identifying criminals through fingerprint examinations. At first he was interested in the mathematical aspect. In 1888 he was commissioned by the British colonial government in British India to develop a person recognition system that was easy to use in practice.

statistics

Galton board

Francis Galton had a keen interest in taking measurements of all kinds and keeping records. This interest brought him to the field of statistics and normal distribution. In order to give his investigations empirical information, Francis Galton needed statistical tools . For example, he and his friend Karl Pearson developed the correlation coefficient , pioneered the use of normal distribution in the 1870s and 1880s and introduced the method of regression . He also developed the Galton board , a model for demonstrating probability distributions.

Intelligence of the crowd

In 1906 Galton attended the annual West England livestock fair, where an ox weight estimation competition was held. Anyone could give their estimate for six pence . A total of 787 people, both inexperienced and some experts, took part and gave a tip.

Galton decided to do an experiment to prove the stupidity of the crowd: he statistically evaluated the nearly 800 estimates. The median of all estimates (1207 pounds) came astonishingly close to the actual weight of the ox (1198 pounds) (deviation of 0.8 percent). Galton's attempt to prove the stupidity of the masses in this way had failed. He called his knowledge Vox populi ( Latin for "voice of the people"), based on the classic saying "Vox populi, vox Dei".

End of life (1909–1911)

Francis Galton was knighted for his services in 1909. From May to December 1910, he was working on a novel called The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, hoping to reach a wider audience . The Methuen publishing house refused to publish it.

Sir Francis Galton died on January 17, 1911.

Awards

In 1860 Galton was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which awarded him the Royal Medal in 1886 , the Darwin Medal in 1902 and the Copley Medal in 1910 .

Some works by Francis Galton

swell

  1. ^ Marius Turda: Modernism and Eugenics. New York 2010, p. 19.
  2. ↑ See The Racist International, p. 29.
  3. ^ Hereditary Talent and Character, in: MacMillan's Magazine, 1865, pp. 325f.
  4. ^ Francis Galton: Genie und Vererbung, Leipzig 1910, p. XXIV.
  5. ^ Francis Galton: Genie und Vererbung, Leipzig 1910, p. 362.
  6. ^ Francis Galton: Inquiries into Human Faculty and ist Development, London 1907, p. 17, footn.
  7. ^ Francis Galton: Essays in Eugenics, London 1909, p. 24.
  8. ↑ Quoted from Jared Diamond, Arm und Reich , Frankfurt 2000.
  9. ^ Francis Galton, Vox populi, Nature No. 1945, Vol. 75, http://galton.org/cgi-bin/searchImages/galton/search/essays/pages/galton-1907-vox-populi_1.htm

Literature on Francis Galton

  • Raymond E. Fancher: Francis Galton and Phrenology . In: Psychologie et Histoire . vol. 2, 2001, ZDB -ID 2060598-5 , p. 131-147 .
  • D. W. Forrest: Francis Galton. The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius . Elek, London 1974, ISBN 0-236-15499-0 .
  • Nicholas Wright Gillham: A Life of Francis Galton. From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics . Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2001, ISBN 0-19-514365-5 .
  • Karl Pearson : The Life, Letters and Labors of Francis Galton. 4 volumes, London 1914–1930 . Vol. 1: Birth 1822 to marriage 1853 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1914.
  • Allan Sekula : The Body and the Archive. In: Herta Wolf (Ed.): Paradigma Photography. Photo criticism at the end of the photographic age. Volume 2: Discourses of Photography. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-29199-8 , pp. 269-334 ( Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1599).
  • Karl Shaw: The weirdest birds in the world. Lexicon of the eccentrics . Heyne, Munich, ISBN 3-453-21174-X , p. 65 ( Heyne 19, Heyne-Sachbuch 809).
  • Lewis M. Terman : The Intelligence Quotient of Francis Galton in Childhood . In: American Journal of Psychology . tape 28 , 1917, ISSN  0002-9556 , pp. 209-215 .

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personal data
SURNAME Galton, Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British naturalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1822
PLACE OF BIRTH Sparkbrook , Birmingham
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1911
Place of death Haslemere , Surrey