Galton spent much of his life studying heredity and eugenics, and he later thought that a person's fingerprints might be a part of human genetic puzzle. He thought that these prints might provide information on differences between people, from race to moral character to intelligence.
While he never made any discoveries in this area, Galton established a fingerprint classification system that is still in use today. In , Galton published his autobiography. He received a knighthood from King Edward the following year. Galton died on January 17, , in Haslemere, England, at the age of In his will, he donated funds for a professorship in eugenics to University College London.
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Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion of the scientific method. Thomson was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose research led to the discovery of electrons. Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician famous for his laws of physics. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection.
English admiral Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe from , helped defeat the Spanish Armada of and was the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan era. In he finally set up and equipped a laboratory, the Biometric Laboratory at University College, London, where the public were tested.
He measured such traits as keenness of sight and hearing, color sense, reaction time, strength of pull and of squeeze, and height and weight. The system of fingerprints in universal use today derived from this work. Galton's application of exact quantitative methods gave results which, processed mathematically, developed a numerical factor he called correlation and defined thus: "Two variable organs are said to be co-related when the variation of the one is accompanied on the average by more or less variation of the other, and in the same direction.
Co-relation must be the consequence of the variations of the two organs being partly due to common causes. If wholly due … the co-relation would be perfect. The developed presentation of Galton's views on heredity is Natural Inheritance A difficult work, with mathematics not beyond criticism, it sets out the "law of ," which attempts to quantify the influence of former generations in the hereditary makeup of the individual. Parents contribute each one-quarter, grandparents each one-sixteenth, and so on for earlier generations.
Claims that Galton anticipated Mendel's ratios seem without foundation. It was a very worthwhile expedition, however, and they learnt much of this region which had been little explored by Europeans.
When Galton returned to England he published an account of his journeys in Tropical South Africa He was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in as a result of his explorations and, three years later, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He wrote another interesting book aimed at giving advice to explorers The art of travel but, although he continued to travel a great deal in Europe, he made no further explorations as a result of his health which never recovered from his African experience.
Perhaps it was the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the species in which marked a change in direction of Galton's interests. Galton was the cousin of Charles Darwin, so perhaps it was natural that he should be one of the first to be converted by the book.
He became convinced that pre-eminence in various fields was due almost entirely to hereditary factors, something which was completely at odds with thinking at the time which basically believed that everyone was born with equal abilities. After reading Galton's book Hereditary Genius Charles Darwin wrote to him saying [ 7 ] :- You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.
Galton opposed those who claimed intelligence or character were determined by environmental factors and defined "genius" as He inquired into racial differences, something almost unacceptable today, and was one of the first to employ questionnaire and survey methods, which he used to investigate mental imagery in different groups of people.
Although weak in mathematics, despite studying the Mathematical Tripos for two years, his ideas strongly influenced the development of statistics particularly his proof that a normal mixture of normal distributions is itself normal. Another of his major findings was reversion. This was his formulation of regression and its link to the bivariate normal distribution.
His work led him to the study of eugenics [ 3 ] :- Galton may be described as the founder of the study of eugenics. His principal contributions to science consisted in his anthropological inquiries, especially into the laws of heredity, where the distinguishing feature of his work was the application of statistical methods.
In , in 'Hereditary Genius', he endeavoured to prove that genius is mainly a matter of ancestry, and he followed that up with many other books and papers on various aspects of the subject.
Let us examine Galton's contribution to statistics in a little more detail. In around he was experimenting with sweet-pea seeds. He used seeds of each of seven different diameters and constructed a two-way plot of diameters of the original seeds against the diameters of the seeds of the next generation. He noticed that the median diameter of the offspring of the large seeds were less than that of their parents while the median diameter of the offspring of the small seeds were greater than that of their parents.
Galton realised that the off-spring tended to revert towards the mean size. Certainly he did not understand at this stage that his findings would apply to any two-way plot, thinking rather than it was peculiar to the situation with which he was experimenting. At first he called the phenomena 'reversion', but later changed the name to 'regression'.
In - 85 the International Health Exhibition was held and in connection with this Galton set up a laboratory to measure human statistics. He collected data such as height, weight, and strength of a large number of people devising himself the apparatus used to make the measurements.
This laboratory continued in existence after the International Health Exhibition closed and it was the forerunner of the Biometric Laboratory run by Karl Pearson at University College, London. Galton now made further progress with the ideas he had already formed concerning regression.
He made two-way plots of heights of parents and the heights of their adult children. He was able to draw the plots in such a way that the coefficient of regression became the slope of the regression line.
In he also examined the size of two different organs from the same person and applied the methods he had been developing to study the degree of association of the sizes. He defined an index of correlation as a measure of the degree to which the two were related.
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