How does Galton compare with Adolphe Quetelet, Florence Nightingale and John Snow, all truly magnificent statistical pioneers of the nineteenth century, and with Augustus De Morgan, the leading Bayesian, who was a professor of mathematics at London University and then University College London? Should he be similarly feted, despite his very harmful contributions to eugenics?
Yes!! but primarily because of his discovery at age 65 of "regression towards the mean::
Sir Francis Galton was a high class' operator': a highly political class-conscious, racist. ableist eugenicist, a highly inventive polymath. able mathematician, and a prolific but not completely original statistician, who used his ill-gotten family wealth to finance much of his success, The source of his scientific expertise isn't completely obvious, given his educational background, and his attitudes towards women were a bit strange and indeed quite appalling
Galton's 1869 book Hereditary Genius contains some dubiously analysed data from intelligence tests, The book he published in 1883 was largely very inventive pseudo-scientific rants. Indeed, his ideas/ravings on eugenics were not taken seriously at the time because of lack of data , He began to acquire more scientific respectability at the age of 62 when he opened an Anthropometric Laboratory, in London but his ideas on eugenics weren't taken seriously in Britain until the aftermath of the Boer War, when he was about eighty, and after Karl Pearson had analysed lots of data on the subject..Galton wasn't knighted until 1909.
While Galton popularised regression, this had been discovered much earlier by Legendre and Gauss. While he had a fetish for the normal distribution, which he thus renamed, this had been discovered by Gauss and Laplace, His developments of the properties of the bivariate normal distribution follow the work of Gauss. His Bayesian inverse probability follows Laplace and De Morgan, It isn't obvious whether he discovered the conjugate Bayesian analysis for the normal distribution, but he certainly knew about ii. He also invented a device to simulate a Bayesian prior to posterior analysis, which mimicked modern day acceptance sampling.
Galton's work during the 1880s on psychometrics and mental testing involved many misapplications of the thin-tailed normal distribution which lead to far too many people being judged inferior or feebleminded or mentally deficient (e.g.later by Sir Cyril Burt and Lionel Penrose) because of their supposed low (white middle class) intelligence,
For a more than favourable account of Galton's statistical contributions, see Darwin, Galton, and the Statisiical Enlightenment by Stephen Stigler Professor Stigler (personal communication) says that he regards Galton's contributions to Eugenics in much better light than I do, I have indeed detected signs of a 'Galton cult' in the Department of Statistics of the traditionally highly Capitalist and colonialist University of Chicago. Steve is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor there, and a highly regarded and technically meticulous statistical historian with his own political slants,
Galton's bean board
TIMELINE
SEE ALSO STATISTICS IN BRITAIN - by Donald A. McKenzie
1822 Born in Sparbrook, BIrmingham. Family (Quakers!) involved in arms trade, slave trade, and related banking activities
1837-39 Pupil at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College London Medical School, Left King Edward's School Birmingham because of narrow curriculum despite showing outstanding intellectual promise,
1840-44 Studied Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Pass degree because of nervous breakdown. Did not study for doctorate,
1844 Joined Freemasons in Cambridge
1844 Immense legacy from father which was to finance all of his future exploits, and which left him without any need of employment by others e.g. he never held an academic position
Mid 1840s Visited Egypt and the Sudan
1850 Explored South-West Africa. Flawed study of intelligence of Africans after measuring
women's backsides.(The UCL librarian Subhartra Das has more information about Galton's attitude towards women.Later on he apparently stalked women in London to take statistical measures of their attractiveness).
1853 Published Tropical South Africa, Awarded gold medal of Royal Geographical Society.
Published Art of Travel (reprinted in 1974)
1869 Published Hereditary Genius
1873: Wrote infamous letter to Times, a psychopathic racist and eugenicist rant about the inhabitants of Africa
1873 Invented 'bean machine' to demonstrate Central Limit Theorem
1874 Published English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture
1875 He and Rev H.W. Watson described the dishonestly named Galton-Watson branching process in a paper in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute entitled 'On the Probability of the History of Families'
(I.J. Bieyname derived the key criticality theorem 28 years before it was rediscovered in incomplete form by Galton and Watson)
(
1883 Published Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, in which he coined the term 'Eugenics'.
1884 Established his own Anthropometric Laboratory in London, later in Natural Science Museum in South Kensington.
1885 Presented pivotal paper (originality unclear to me) on multivariate analysis to Royal Anthropological Institute e.g. his analysis of heights of parents and adult children in the form of a bivariate frequency chart,
1886: Published his highly controversial and since discredited (please google) pseudo-scientific article 'Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature' (Regression towards mean) in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Britain and Ireland
1888 Claimed to discover correlation, first published by Auguste Bravais in 1844
1889 Published Natural Inheritance
1889 Psychometrics Institute founded in Cambridge following Galton's earlier ideas.
1892 Published Fingerprints,Note that fingerprints had previously been developed by Sir William Herchel in India during the 1850s for identification purposes, but Galton had recorded about 8000 observations in 1882, and Scotland Yard adopted the method.
1899 He and Karl Pearson met in London with the American zoologist Charles Davenport, who, thus inspired, subsequently founded the American Eugenics Records Office
1904 Delivered highly inflammatory racist lecture to Sociological Society, Attended by German racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz, immediately prior to the German genocides of the indigenous tribes of Namibia,
1904 Founded Galton Laboratory at University College London, at his own expense, for research into Eugenics,
1907 Co-founded Eugenics Education Society with Sybil Gotto, became honorary president
1909 Founded The Eugenics Review, a monthly journal
1909 Finally knighted for his sins
1911 Died in Haslemere, Surrey. Funded Galton Chair of Eugenics in his will, a position subsequently held at University College London by Karl Pearson, Ronald Fisher, and Lionel Penrose who took Eugenics at UCL until a least 1965, And until 1975, if we include the fourth Galton professor (now of human genetics) Harry Harris, and until the current day, if we include some of the contributions by the UCL Department of Psychiatry. Meanwhile the subject of Economics has also been amoralised by Galtonian eugenics,
The Galton Institute (formerly the Eugenics Society and now interested in human genetics) has survived Galton to this very day, as has the abuse by maltreatment of people with mental health issues,,
Pearson and Galton in 1910
FURTHER INCOMPLETE MATERIAL ON GALTON (2015)
This is how Scott Forster and I advised the Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL during July 2019: Please click on UCL Written Contribution for full report, and on UCL Verbal
for what I said to the Committee,
Sir FRANCIS GALTON (1822-1911) spent much of his life exploring variation in human populations, and its implications. See for example his work Hereditary Genius (1869).
In 1883, Galton coined the term Eugenics. In his book Enquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, Galton called for eugenic marriages promoting 'able' married couples to have children, and advocated endowments for these couples(p214). As indicated later, some of the material in this book (on criminals and insanity) would appear to amount to pseudo-science.
Following his publication of Hereditary Genius, Galton's “quest for data and accountability”i would involve treating human beings as open to classification and categorisation in the same way as plants or animals. Playing with themes of 'degeneration' and 'contagion' Galton called for restrictions on those he deemed genetically inferior.
According to Francis Galton, British Psychologist ii , which references Jensen (2002), Simonton (2003), and Irvine (1986)
“It seemed obvious and even unarguable to Galton that, from a eugenic viewpoint, superior mental and behavioural capacities, as well as physical health, are advantageous, not only to an individual but for the well-being of society as a whole (Jensen,2002). Within this mindset led the inevitable value-laden categorization or ranking of populations based on measurable traits and natural ability”.
“It seemed obvious and even unarguable to Galton that, from a eugenic viewpoint, superior mental and behavioural capacities, as well as physical health, are advantageous, not only to an individual but for the well-being of society as a whole (Jensen,2002). Within this mindset led the inevitable value-laden categorization or ranking of populations based on measurable traits and natural ability”.
The article continues that “It followed that Galton estimated from his field observations in Africa that the African people were 'two grades' below Anglo-Saxons' position in the normal frequency distribution of general mental ability, which gave claim to the scientific validation of Africans' mental inferiority compared with Anglo-Saxons (Jensen, 2002); findings that continued to spark controversy in academia today”.
This proves that Galton was a racist in the worst possible terms. He imposed his white supremacist measures of mental ability on Africans and used statistical 'science' to justify British Colonialism.
Furthermore "Galton was the first to 'demonstrate' that the Laplace-Gauss distribution or the "normal distribution" could be applied to human psychological attributes, including intelligence (Simonton, 2003). From this finding, he coined the use of percentile scores for measuring relative standing on various measurements in relation to the normal distribution (Jensen, 2002). He even established the world's first mental testing centre, in which a person could take a battery of tests and receive a written report of the results (P. Irvine, 1986). Given the dubious nature of the statistical methodology (see below), this method of psycho-analysis would appear to be open to question,
All of this was played out against a growing recognition of the rottenness of an increasingly industrialized and urbanized Britain. See Andrew Mearn's 1883 publication The Bitter Outcry of Outcast London and the 1890 appearance of William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out.
Eugenics was not universally popular in its heydays. Early critics of Eugenics included Lester Frank Ward, GK Chesterton(see his 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils), Franz Boas, and Halliday Sutherland. Liberal MP Josiah Wedgwood would speak against the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. This Act, though containing elements of welfare state provision, also made judgements on mental abilities as if they were fixed and biological rather than the result of material social conditions.
The early eugenicists cannot therefore be exonerated on the grounds that their preachings were unquestioned at that time.
The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 by Galtoniii who acted as its first president until his death. From 1926 the Society was renamed the Eugenics Society and later became the Galton Institute Eugenics. (Lucy Bland and Lesley A. Hall, Oxford Handbook of the history of Eugenics, 2010, P.214)
It has been said that Galton's “new science spread like wildfire in the UK and USA” (Grenon and Merrick, Intellectual and Developmental Difficulties, Front Public Health, 2014).
In 1907, The State of Indiana passed a law enabling the prevention of the “procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists” ivwhich is claimed to be the world's first eugenic lawv.
Galton's efforts to improve the human race by the selective breeding of those with perceived greatest talent, must, at that time, have been interpreted by one and all as discriminating against those with less supposed talent. Furthermore, by setting his own standards, he tried to mould the population towards what he a wealthy Victorian colonialist would want it to be.
When judging the merits of different people, Galton and his followers fitted the 'Laplacian or Gaussian distribution' to observations of a large variety of measures e.g. of mental ability. Some of his followers fitted this distribution to measures of 'inferiority' or of 'feeble-mindedness' (including 'idiocy' and 'imbecility').
Galton and Pearson had the temerity to rename this the 'Normal' distribution even though this probability distribution is not valid that frequently in practice when modelling statistical observations. (Owing to the Central Limit Effect the normal curve is however frequently accurate for describing the distributions of test statistics, though only under specific theoretical assumptions). The reasons for using the term 'normal' would appear to be highly political. It enabled Galton and his followers to regard too many people as 'abnormal'. Galton had an obsession with the normal distribution because of the theoretically derived Central Limit Effect and falsely believed that a great many variables are normally distributed,
The normal distribution has a bell-shaped density with remarkably thin, symmetric tails. In practice, and as noticed by many twentieth century statisticians, many data sets are better describable by probability distributions whose densities have at least one thicker tail that the normal. For example, an individual discarded as 'mentally defective' or;'feeble-minded', because his arbitrary measure of 'feeble-mindedness' lies below the naively estimated third population percentile, might be falsely discarded, since the actual third population percentile could be considerably smaller.
According to Bernard Norton in Karl Pearson and Statistics: The Social Origins of Scientific Innovation (Social Studies in Science, 1978, P.8-9),
“In the 1890s, Francis Galton was one of Britain's leading 'men of science'. As several authors have pointed out, he was a man motivated by strong eugenic views, a man whose attempts to understand human heredity were inspired by the hope of showing the dominance of nature over nurture; and this, in turn, led him to uncover certain crucial statistical notions - notably those of a distribution of variations, of correlation and of regression. Before 1900, Galton was able to attract only a small following for eugenics, which remained more of a catalyst to research than a social movement. But, as several authors have noted, the events of the Boer war, coming as they did in a period occupied with a 'quest for national efficiency', were to pave the way for a strong popular interest in eugenics in the first decade of the twentieth century”.
It should be noted that statistical correlation is a very dangerous concept. In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume (1738-40) argued that correlation can never be used to prove causality. Moreover, statistical correlations are all too often potentially spurious vi in the sense that further 'confounding variables' may become apparent which render any observed correlation between the two variables of interest to be meaningless.
For example, any supposed correlations between measures of mental ability and any other key variables, e.g. social status, are potentially spurious. In addition to abnormal behaviour and very low scores on IQ tests, eugenicists frequently linked "feeble-mindedness"to promiscuity, criminality, and social dependency.
Galton's somewhat farcical discourse on criminality and the insanevii describes numerous very subjective supposed correlations many of which should be treated with a pinch of salt. This has the appearance of pseudo-science.
According to Hailey McKinnon ,“Galton took Eugenics as "the science of improving stock", not only by judicious mating, but whatever tends to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have”viii.
The Liberal Welfare Reforms of 1906 to 1914 led to the beginnings of the British welfare state. Often benevolently remembered, they were pushed by Fabian eugenicists and imperialists of the Liberal Party (particularly the group known as the 'Co-efficients') with ties to the 'National Efficiency' movement in Britain who feared degeneration of 'the British race' might lead to the loss of the British empire. This fear was generated by battle losses and large rejection of potential recruits during the Second Boer Warix.
On the 5 June 1873, Galton wrote an extremely racist letter to the Times of London, entitled Africa for the Chinese (see Appendix B). During this long rant, Galton poured scorn and ridicule on the 'inferior Negro race', Hindus, and Arabs.
Galton also expressed anti-semitic opinions. On the 27th of October 1884, Galton wrote to Alphone de Candolle, “It strikes me that the Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations, and that there is need of evidence that they are capable of fulfilling the varied duties of a civilized nation by themselves”x.
The German doctor Alfred Ploetz proposed his theory of 'racial hygiene' (Rassen-hygiene; race-based Eugenics in his 1895 book Racial Hygiene Basics.(Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene).
In her book From Racism to Genocide, Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen E. Schafft (2004, P.43) describes the influence of Galton on Ploetz. Ploetz attended Galton's
1904 lecture Eugenics, its Definition, Scope, and Aims.
Then in 1905, Ploetz created the German Society for Racial Hygienexi, which was renamed the International Society for Racial Hygiene in 1907. This Berlin-based society maintained good relations with Francis Galton and his British Eugenics Society and other Eugenics societies around the world. How much Galton and Pearson influenced what happened next is open to question. Ploetz would go on to advise the Nazis about racial policyxii.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1981-mackenzie-statisticsinbritain18651930.pdf
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