Natural Inheritance

by Francis Galton

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Genres: Genetics

259 pages, Hardcover

First published February 10, 2009

About the author

Sir Francis Galton, FRS was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.

Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. 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 was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.

As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none by its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for.

As 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 invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.

He was cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton and half-cousin of Charles Darwin.

Reviews

[Neal Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dry but interesting historical read. Galton’s work is similar to modern observational studies, where a large set of data is collected with an overall goal and is then subsequently explored. From a statistical viewpoint the largest difference from current practice is that the estimated values are taken as given (and almost always rounded to numbers divisible by 5) with little regard to their uncertainty or the possibility that the inductive conclusions may simply have been due to lucky breaks in the observed data which shows how revolutionary the work of Fisher and others was 50 years later. There is also a strong desire to provide simple formulas for complicated scenarios, and to expect them to hold in all similar cases, which now seems unrealistic. This book is best remembered for the introduction of the term regression, with the primary example being of human height. I've used this example in teaching regression many times and it is certainly the strongest and most enduring part of the book.