Galton Research Articles

Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth‐century British geography

The paper explores the promotion of method in nineteenth‐century British geography. Attention is paid to the emphasis accorded scientific instruments in a period when scientific subjects were, in practice and in personnel, ‘disciplining’ themselves. The role ascribed to scientific instruments and method is examined with reference to the work in the Royal Geographical Society of Julian R. Jackson and his What to observe, or the traveller’s remembrancer (1841), and William Hamilton’s essay on geographical methods in John Herschel’s Manual of scientific enquiry (1849). These works are further explored with reference to two related texts, the Society’s Hints to travellers (Raper and Fitzroy 1854) and Francis Galton’s The art of travel (1855). The paper for the first time brings together evidence for the place of scientific instruments within geography’s methodological pronouncements with scholarship in the history of technology and the history of science. In doing so, the paper highlights the importance of critical histories of geography’s methods, instruments and associated practices. The conclusion addresses the implications of such research for providing yet richer histories of geography that might address not just the subject’s cognitive content and institutional context but matters of epistemological procedure, moral conduct and authorial regimen in relation to precision instrumentation.

“A Moral Intelligence”: Mental Disability and Eugenic Resistance in Welty’s “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”

When Mr. Shiftlet, the one-armed itinerant of Flannery O'Connor's Life You Save May Be Your Own, attempts to convince Mrs. Crater, his would-be host, that he is useful despite his handicap, he argues against the existence of a link between physical ability and moral character: There ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn't fix for you, one-arm jackleg or not. I'm a man, he says, even if I ain't a whole one. I got ... a moral intelligence! (149). Mr. Shiftlet's declaration is savvy given his own condition and that of Mrs. Crater's daughter, who has severe mental disabilities. In disputing a connection between physical fitness and moral competence, Mr. Shiftlet denies one of the central tenets of the movement, which was most influential in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Privileging nature over nurture, eugenic ideology held that heredity determined both the biological and moral traits of the individual. This connection created a hierarchy in which moral intelligence correlated with physical wellness and separated the fit from the unfit. According to Edward J. Larson, national eugenic discourse was concerned with fortifying Caucasian racial purity, limiting the ills perpetuated by the degenerate and feeble-minded, and preventing dysgenic marriages (1). In the purported interest of improving humanity, eugenicists sought to institutionalize people with mental disabilities and segregate them by sex in order to prevent reproduction. Later the emphasis shifted to promote the forced sterilization of the (Larson 8). Within such a paradigm, marriage involving one partner with a mental disability was a eugenic worst-case scenario. The mentally disabled partner constituted a threat to communal morality, as would any potential offspring who might inherit the parent's ethical and physical deficiencies and thus impede genetic improvement. Eudora Welty's Lily Daw and the Three Ladies and Flannery O'Connor's Life You Save May Be Your Own both engage this dysgenic scenario. Written during and after the peak of eugenic influence in the United States, these texts feature the prospect of the marriage of a woman with mental disabilities. With this proximity in mind, I argue for reading Welty's and O'Connor's stories, written in 1937 and 1953 respectively, as two critiques of the eugenic rhetoric of human improvement. Here I will examine these stories within the historical and rhetorical context of the movement, particularly as it affected conceptions of moral intelligence and the significance of bloodlines in the U.S. South. Historicizing Eugenic Ideology The movement had its origin in England, and particularly in the work of Francis Galton, who, in 1883, coined the term derived from the Greek for well born (Rosen 5). Inspired by the research of his cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton sought to understand how heredity, selection, and variation caused human development. He was eager to replace traditional religious narratives of creation and fallen humanity with secular conceptions of evolutionary progress. Galton believed giftedness was a family characteristic and thus advocated for governmental encouragement of marriages between socially ascendant men and women. These kinds of proposals were termed positive eugenics, as opposed to the negative eugenics strain developed by later proponents, which focused on preventing marriages between those deemed unfit (Larson 19). In Galton saw the opportunity for science quickly and kindly to accomplish the improvements that Nature facilitated slowly and ruthlessly (qtd in Rosen 5). Galton's work gained an audience in the United States, where the movement achieved its greatest influence between 1895 and 1945 (Larson 5). In the U.S., found a home among other so-called progressive reforms, which generally sought to solve social problems caused by urbanization and industrialism. …

FORT NAMUTONI: FROM MILITARY STRONGHOLD TO TOURIST CAMP

"... this fortress was not just a white elephant, it was actually occupied and played a major role in the settlement of Germans in the far North." (own translation) - D.W. Krynauw Die Verhaal van Namutoni, p 3. Introduction Fort Namutoni, the last White outpost east of the familiar Etosha Pan, has seen a long and varied history. Namutoni was initially referred to as a swampy fountain covered with reeds. This was in the year 1851 when the first White travellers Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Charles Andersson (1828-1867) reached this part of South-West Africa on their way to Ondangua.

<i>Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman George Robb Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. By Angelique Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 272. $39.95 (paper). This succinct and entertaining book, first published in 2003, examines how feminists, especially New Woman writers like Sarah Grand and George Egerton, employed eugenic ideas to argue “for the vital contribution of women in regenerating the British imperial race” (xv). Angelique Richardson convincingly argues for the central role played by women in the popularization of eugenics, the now-discredited but once highly influential science of selective breeding, in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This new paperback edition should give the book a wider readership, which it richly deserves. The eugenics movement, which reached its high point in the early twentieth century, not surprisingly became enmeshed in political and cultural debates over the “woman question.” With its emphasis on reproduction [End Page 345] and racial regeneration, eugenics was inextricably linked to contemporary concerns regarding marriage, motherhood, and appropriate gender roles. Just as Victorian medicine provided biological justification for the subordination of women, eugenics could also bolster traditional gender hierarchies. Conservative eugenists, such as the movement’s founder, Francis Galton, feared that the achievement of feminist goals would divert the most accomplished women from their primary eugenic responsibility: motherhood. Still, as Richardson argues, eugenics was not only a tool of patriarchy. Women were active in the British Eugenics Society, and many prominent eugenists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby supported suffrage and higher education for women. Eugenic ideas and language were also widely employed by British feminists to buttress their arguments for liberation. This is an aspect of eugenic thought that has been underappreciated by historians and literary critics, though not to the extent that Richardson imagines. The claim that she “explores for the first time, the intimate relations between eugenics and some feminists” is an exaggeration (i). A number of scholars—Rosaleen Love, Lucy Bland, Joy Dixon, and myself—have examined feminist eugenics, though much of our work is unacknowledged by Richardson in her notes and bibliography. Such complaints aside, Love and Eugenics is a marvelous survey of the eugenics movement and its intersections with Victorian feminism and popular culture. Based on an extensive reading of primary source materials —journalistic debates, popular scientific writings, New Woman novels, and the correspondence of prominent eugenists—Richardson’s book vividly brings to life a lost world of fin de siècle social fears and scientific bravado. The author provides brief but lucid overviews of evolutionary thought, hereditarian debates, the scientific construction of women, and social purity crusades. Disparate strands of Victorian culture are drawn deftly together. After introductory chapters covering eugenics, feminism, and social purity politics, the book concentrates on the eugenic writings of three prominent feminists: Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird. In her day, Grand was the most celebrated proponent of eugenic love, and her best-selling novels, The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), explored the misery of marrying without rational selection. Like most social purity feminists, Grand argued that men had a natural tendency toward vice and promiscuity, while women had instincts for virtue and chastity. Women should therefore be given the chief role in the making of marriages, as only they “were sufficiently race aware to make responsible sexual choices” (56). Richardson gives astute readings of Grand’s novels, especially highlighting the author’s antipathy to sentimental, romantic novels and the degenerative effects of modern culture. In The Heavenly Twins, for example, the heroine, Evadne, prefers reading medical textbooks to silly love stories. Armed with such knowledge, she avoids marriage to a syphilitic, unlike the more conventional Edith, who dies after giving birth to a deformed child. [End Page 346] Like Sarah Grand, the writer George Egerton (the penname of Mary Dunne Bright) also promoted the idea that women were more in touch with nature and thus better able to select biologically fit fathers for their children. However, as Richardson points out, Egerton was more socially radical, often seeing marriage and conventional morality as obstacles to good breeding. In Egerton...

Sheldon Rubenfeld (ed.), Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. xxii + 233, £25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-230-62192-3.

Sheldon Rubenfeld (ed.), Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. xxii + 233, £25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-230-62192-3. - Volume 56 Issue 1

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)

Sir Francis Galton was the founder of the quantitative study of the psychology of individual differences. In his work on intelligence, he identified the general factor later demonstrated by Spearman, the importance of heredity, race differences, and dysgenic fertility. His proposals on eugenics were widely accepted in the first half of the Twentieth Century, but have subsequently been largely rejected. With the benefit of hindsight, his article reviews Galton’s contributions to differential psychology, and assesses his conclusions in the light of current knowledge.

Alison Bashford and Phillipa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xx + 586, hardback, £85.00/$150.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-537314-1.

Alison Bashford and Phillipa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xx + 586, hardback, £85.00/$150.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-537314-1. - Volume 56 Issue 1

Return of the Jukes: Eugenic Mythologies and Internet Evangelism

Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, launching a movement that would eventually advocate widespread state legislation for restriction of marriage and sterilization of those considered “defective.” That movement occurred at the same time two “family studies” became popular tools for teaching eugenics. The first involved the Jukes family, a clan of social outcasts from New York State. The second was the model Christian family of Jonathan Edwards, famous leader of the evangelical Great Awakening of the 18th Century. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the characteristics of the Jukes and the Edwards were used both by evangelical preachers and the leaders of the eugenics movement to exemplify how bad traits become a family curse and good traits yield familial bounty, passed down from generation to generation. In the religious context, the stories were coupled with biblical verses prescribing how the “sins of the fathers” constitute an inescapable, divinely ordained legacy. Though the accuracy of both the Jukes and the Edwards family stories were seriously discredited decades ago, several recent books written from the evangelical perspective have revived their popularity. Dozens of web sites similarly invoke the Jukes and Edwards mythologies as grist for sermons, religious counseling or self-help messages. The argument of these latter day evangelists often includes a tone of contempt for the poor and dependent that echoes the rhetoric of the most common strain of eugenic reasoning from the early 20th century.

Regarding the Confusion between the Population Concept and Mayr's “Population Thinking”

Ernst Mayr said that one of Darwin's greatest contributions was to show scholars the way to population thinking, and to help them discard a mindset of typological thinking. Population thinking rejects a focus on a central representative type, and emphasizes the variation among individuals. However, Mayr's choice of terms has led to confusion, particularly among biologists who study natural populations. Both population thinking and the concept of a biological population were inspired by Darwin, and from Darwin the chain for both concepts runs through Francis Galton who introduced the statistical usage of "population" that appears in Mayr's population thinking. It was Galton's "population" that was modified by geneticists and biometricians in the early 20th century to refer to an interbreeding and evolving community of organisms. Under this meaning, a population is a biological entity and so paradoxically population thinking, which emphasizes variation at the expense of dwelling on entities, is usually not about populations. Mayr did not address the potential for misunderstanding but for him the important part of the population concept was that the organisms within a population were variable, and so he probably thought there should not be confusion between population thinking and the concept of a population.

Confidence Interval Estimation for a Difference between Two Dependent Intraclass Correlation Coefficients with Variable Class Sizes

Abstract Four confidence intervals for a difference between two dependent intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) are developed, focusing on applications to family studies. The basic idea adopted here is that confidence intervals for a difference between two parameters can be obtained from confidence limits for each parameter. Among the four confidence procedures considered, the one based on the inverse hyperbolic tangent transformation for a single ICC performed best. Francis Galton's data on human stature are used to illustrate the methodology.

Mutation: the history of an idea from Darwin to genomics

Today, most scientists regard the term as a description of a change in an individual gene, and more precisely as some minute alteration of the DNA of that gene, especially a nucleotide substitution. But the idea of mutation has changed considerably from the pre-Mendelian concepts of Darwin's generation, who viewed fluctuating variations as the raw material on which evolution acted, to today's up-to-the-minute genomic context of mutation. Mutation: The History of an Idea from Darwin to Genomics explores six generations of mutation research, providing the backgroundthe people and the ideasfor this biological journey. After exploring Darwin's and Francis Galton's concepts of mutation, Carlson shows how the 1900 rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's experiments let to a discontinuous model of evolution by mutation and how cytological investigations led to the chromosome theory of heredity of classical genetics in which there was random mutation in genes. Carlson details how Mendelian and biometric approaches to heredity and evolution were closely tied and how induction of mutations by radiation and chemical mutagens led to biochemical investigations of gene action, shifting attention to the chemistry of the gene. The interpretation of the gene as DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code then gave rise to molecular interpretations of mutation, views that also impacted evolutionary biology, population genetics, commercial development of plants and animals, and human genetics. This book shows how generational definitions or assessments of mutation have responded to the technologies added to science and the experiments that abounded with the inquiries of each successive generation. These observations are combined with an exploration of how the nonscientific public has shifted its understanding and concern about mutations over the past 150 or more years. Carlson's historical approach in this bookexamining the evolution of a conceptreveals the way science works, incrementally by small steps of additions and replacements rather than by dramatic, and rare, paradigm shifts.

Punnett’s square

The origin and development of Punnett’s Square for the enumeration and display of genotypes arising in a cross in Mendelian genetics is described. Due to R. C. Punnett, the idea evolved through the work of the ‘Cambridge geneticists’, including Punnett’s colleagues William Bateson, E. R. Saunders and R. H. Lock, soon after the rediscovery of Mendel’s paper in 1900. These geneticists were thoroughly familiar with Mendel’s paper, which itself contained a similar square diagram. A previously-unpublished three-factor diagram by Sir Francis Galton existing in the Bateson correspondence in Cambridge University Library is then described. Finally the connection between Punnett’s Square and Venn Diagrams is emphasized, and it is pointed out that Punnett, Lock and John Venn overlapped as Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Copious illustrations are given.

Physiognomy, Reality Television and the Cosmetic Gaze

In this article we argue that our present-day mode of looking at bodies expresses a cosmetic gaze, that is, a gaze already informed by the techniques, expectations and strategies of bodily modification and a way of looking at bodies as awaiting an improvement. The cosmetic gaze, as we see it epitomized in contemporary media phenomena like reality makeover shows on television, is also a physiognomic gaze in that it creates a short-circuit between inside and outside beauty. Our article traces some of the history of the present short-circuit between an inside and an outside and analyzes how different visual media have informed and shaped the gaze in historically specific ways, but also how aspects of that history inhere in media practices today. More specifically, we will analyze John Caspar Lavater’s hand-drawn portraits, Francis Galton’s photographical composites, the anthropometrically defined but still intuitively discovered ideals of the ‘Aryan body’ in Nazi Germany, and today’s reality television makeover shows in order to understand some of the continuities and discontinuities of the cosmetic gaze.

The mythologization of regression towards the mean

In the quantitative methodology literature, there now exists what can be considered a received account of the enigmatic phenomenon known as regression towards the mean (RTM), the origins of which can be traced to the work of Sir Francis Galton circa 1885. On the received account, RTM is, variably, portrayed as a ubiquitous, unobservable property of individual-level difference and change phenomena, a force that impacts upon the characteristics of individual entities, an explanation for difference and change phenomena, and a profound threat to the drawing of correct conclusions in experiments. In the current paper, we describe the most essential components of the received account, and offer arguments to the effect that the received account is a mythologization of RTM. In particular, we: (a) describe the scientific and statistical setting in which a consideration of RTM is embedded; (b) translate Galton’s discussion of RTM into modern statistical terms; (c) excavate a definition of the concept regression towards the mean from Galton’s discussion of RTM; and (d) employ the excavated definition to dismantle certain of the most essential components of the received account.

The politics of participation: Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory and the making of civic selves

AbstractHistorians have given much attention to museums and exhibitions as sites for the production and communication of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But few studies have analysed how the activity and participation of visitors was designed and promoted at such locations. Using Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London 1884 as the empirical focal point, this paper explores a new mode of involving exhibition audiences in the late nineteenth century. Its particular form of address is characterized by an ambition to transform the visitors' self-understanding by engaging them with various techniques of scientific observation and representation of social issues. By analysing the didactics of this particular project, I argue that the observational ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and associated modes of representation in this instance became an integrated part of a political vision of self-observation and self-reformation. Thus the exhibit and related projects by Galton not only underpinned a theoretical lesson, but also were part of an effort to extend a complex set of practices among the general public.

Francis Galton and Regression to the Mean

AbstractGalton founded many concepts in statistics, among them correlation, quartile, and percentile. Here Stephen Senn examines one of Galton's most important statistical legacies – one that is at once so trivial that it is blindingly obvious, and so deep that many scientists spend their whole career being fooled by it.

Francis Galton: Measuring the Immeasurable

Abstract How many statisticians can be the subject of an hour-long stand-up comedy routine? Possibly only Galton. Here Dan Maier, writer and performer of the one-man show “The stranger notions of Francis Galton”, explains why he cannot help being fascinated by the man.

Galton's Millions

Abstract How much is a million? How can we make sense of a number that big? Francis Galton tried to measure a million in flowers. There are other ways. In homage to the great man, Michele Bottone argues that a million is all around us, and all that is required to visualise it is a bit of ingenuity, patience and imagination.

Francis Galton Centenary

Abstract This year marks the centenary of the death of the great Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, and wildly eccentric, is a key and curious figure in the founding of modern statistics – and of several other sciences as well. We celebrate the life and achievements of an extraordinary man.

Elof Axel Carlson: Mutation: the history of an idea from Darwin to genomics

The concept of mutation has been fundamental to genetics since its beginnings, and over the past century we have gradually come to understand its nature, its underlying mechanisms and its consequences. Mutation is every bit as central to human and medical genetics as it is to other branches of the Weld; indeed, in recent years, studies of human mutation have come to outrank those on other species in terms of the amount of data on both the number and variety of mutational events in humans, while for the practising medical geneticist mutation is the bedrock for both genetic counselling and for understanding of the molecular pathology of inherited disease. In studies of evolution, too, mutation has been pivotal for the development of our concepts and in providing clear evidence of how we (and other species) have evolved. So altogether one could not ask for a more essential topic on which to base an historical account to complement the detailed present-day analyses. Elof Carlson is well placed to write such an account, and we can be grateful that he has done so in a succinct and easily readable, as well as authoritative book. Carlson trained as a Drosophila geneticist with Hermann Muller—surely the person who has done more than any other in advancing our understanding of mutation. But he is also a historian, as witnessed by his previous books, including his early (1966) The Gene, a Critical History; his 1981 biography of Muller; and his masterly Mendel’s Legacy: the Origin of Classical Genetics (2004). In an introductory overview, Carlson emphasises how the concept of mutation has altered with our increasing understanding. Indeed, until the Mendelian rediscovery, mutation was no more than a concept, and often a vague and variable one at that. Carlson traces the changes during the second half of the 19th century, before the word ‘mutation’ itself had come into use. Not surprisingly, it is Charles Darwin, for whom variation and its causes was the foundation for natural selection, who is the central Wgure in these early years. Darwin’s meticulous documentation of inherited variation across a wide range of animals and plants, set out most fully in his 1868 book Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, actually contains a considerable amount of information on human disorders clearly following mendelian inheritance (e.g. ectodermal dysplasia, brachydactyly, inherited blindness), even though he saw these as less important in evolution than recurrent small, heritable changes. He was intensely frustrated by not being able to Wnd a satisfactory mechanism for explaining either class of inherited variation, and one senses from correspondence with close friends and colleagues that he recognised that his hypothesis of ‘pangenesis’ with particulate ‘gemmules’ migrating to the gonads from diVerent organs was never really convincing, even before this was bluntly demonstrated by Francis Galton’s transfusion experiments on Darwin’s own rabbits, which failed to show any eVect. Galton himself was no more successful than Darwin in providing a satisfactory mechanism for inherited variation, though he did develop a robust quantitative basis for inheritance. But neither Galton nor Darwin can be blamed for failing to explain any mechanism for mutation when there was no clear concept of what it was that had to mutate—the gene itself. In the last decade of the 19th century, William Bateson (1894) and Hugo de Vries (1901), both of whom used the term ‘mutation’, had swung behind the importance of major P. S. Harper (&) Institute of Medical Genetics, School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Heath Park, Cardiff CF14 4XN, UK e-mail: HarperPS@Cardiff.ac.uk