# Francis Galton **Sir Francis Galton** (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was the British polymath, half-cousin of [[Charles Darwin]], who coined the word "eugenics" and built the statistical tools, regression and correlation among them, that his followers used to rank human beings by supposed hereditary worth. He sits at the root of the KB's [[Eugenics]] lineage, and the modern [[Human Biodiversity]] and [[Dysgenics]] arguments still lean on his framing. ## Life and work Galton and Darwin shared a grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Independently wealthy, Galton worked as an explorer, meteorologist and statistician, and was knighted in 1909. | Year | Work | What it did | |---|---|---| | 1865 | "Hereditary Talent and Character" (*Macmillan's Magazine*) | First argument that mental ability is inherited like physical traits and could be bred for | | 1869 | *Hereditary Genius* | Book-length version; traced eminence through families | | 1877–1888 | Sweet-pea and stature studies | Regression toward the mean (first presented 1877); correlation (1888) | | 1883 | *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development* | Coined "eugenics," from the Greek for "well-born" | | 1884 | Anthropometric Laboratory | Measured more than 9,000 visitors at the International Health Exhibition | | 1892–1895 | *Finger Prints* and two follow-up books | Sorted prints into broad classes, early groundwork for forensic identification | He also popularized the phrase "nature versus nurture" and introduced the questionnaire survey as a way to collect data on human populations. ## The science and the program The tools were real contributions: regression and correlation are standard statistics today (see [[Correlation is Not Causation]]). Galton built them to answer a ranking question. *Hereditary Genius* ranked races as well as families, stating that "the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own." Eugenics, in his framing, meant society encouraging the reproduction of the able and discouraging that of the rest. The same differential-fertility worry, that the "unfit" out-breed the "fit," is the origin of what later became [[Dysgenics]]. ## Institutional legacy Galton endowed University College London's first chair of eugenics; [[Karl Pearson]] held it and turned Galton's ideas into a quantitative research program (the chair is now the Galton Chair of Genetics). The Eugenics Education Society, founded in Britain in 1907 on his inspiration, renamed itself the Galton Institute in 1989 and the Adelphi Genetics Forum in 2021, and now rejects coercive eugenics. The movement he named fed American sterilization laws and the Nazi regime's racial hygiene program ([[Eugenics Timeline]]). On June 19, 2020, following its Inquiry into the History of Eugenics, UCL removed the names: the Galton Lecture Theatre became Lecture Theatre 115, the Pearson Lecture Theatre became G22, and the Pearson Building became the North-West Wing. The provost said that honoring these figures "creates an unwelcome environment for many in our community." ## The line to the modern right The [[Human Biodiversity]] movement and its [[Race Realism]] predecessor treat Galton's tradition as their ancestry: heritable intelligence, group differences, and the claim that public policy is fighting nature. [[Richard Lynn]]'s *Dysgenics* (1996), the closing chapters of [[Charles Murray]]'s [[The Bell Curve]], and [[Robert K. Graham]]'s Nobel-laureate sperm bank all restate Galton's program in newer language. What survives from him in mainstream science is the statistics, not the ranking. ## See Also - [[Eugenics]] · [[Eugenics Timeline]] · [[Scientific Racism]] · [[Social Darwinism]] · [[Herbert Spencer]] - [[Human Biodiversity]] · [[Dysgenics]] · [[Race Realism]] · [[Pioneer Fund]] · [[Mankind Quarterly]] - [[Charles Darwin]] · [[Karl Pearson]] · [[Charles Murray]] · [[Richard Lynn]] · [[Robert K. Graham]] · [[Genetics]]