Francis Galton

Sir **Francis Galton** FRS (Birmingham, 16 February 1822 – Surrey, 17 January 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English  scientist. His main field of work was human biology and inheritance of mental characteristics.

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

Galton produced over 340 papers and books in his lifetime. He created the statistical concepts of normal distribution, correlation and regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence.

He was the first person to do twin studies. His method was to trace twins through their life-history, making many kinds of measurement. Unfortunately, though he knew about monozygotic (identical twins) and dizygotic twins, he did not appreciate the real genetic difference. Twin studies of the modern kind did not appear until the 1920s.

He also introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data on human communities. He needed such data for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the very term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology.

Galton created a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. 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.

## Books by Galton

- 1853 _Narrative of an explorer in tropical South Africa_.
- 1855. _The art of travel, or shifts and contrivances available in wild countries_. Murray, London.
- 1863. _Meteorographica_. Macmillan, London.
- 1869 [2nd ed 1892]. _Hereditary genius: its laws and consequences_. Macmillan, London.
- 1874. _English men of science: their nature and nurture_.
- 1883. _Inquiries into human faculty and its development_. Macmillan, London.
- 1884. _Record of family faculties_. Macmillan, London.
- 1889. _Natural inheritance_. Macmillan, London.
- 1892. _Fingerprints_. Macmillan, London.
- 1893. _Decipherment of blurred finger prints_.
- 1895. _Fingerprint directories_.
- 1909. _Memories of my life_. Macmillan, London.
- 1909. _Noteworthy families_. Murray, London.

## Infobox (_scientist)

- **name**: Francis Galton
- **image**: Francis Galton.jpg
- **caption**: Francis Galton
- **birth place**: Birmingham, England
- **death place**: Haslemere, Surrey, England
- **nationality**: United Kingdom, British
- **field**: Anthropology and heredity
- **work institution**: Meteorological Council
Royal Geographical Society
- **alma mater**: King's College London
University of Cambridge, Cambridge University
- **doctoral advisor**: William Hopkins
- **doctoral students**: Karl Pearson
- **known for**: Eugenics
Bean machine, The Galton board
- **prizes**: Copley medal (1910)