Galton Research Articles

Regression Revisited

Summary Sir Francis Galton introduced median regression and the use of the quantile function to describe distributions. Very early on the tradition moved to mean regression and the universal use of the Normal distribution, either as the natural ‘error’ distribution or as one forced by transformation. Though the introduction of ‘quantile regression’ refocused attention on the shape of the variability about the line, it uses nonparametric approaches and so ignores the actual distribution of the ‘error’ term. This paper seeks to show how Galton's approach enables the complete regression model, deterministic and stochastic elements, to be modelled, fitted and investigated. The emphasis is on the range of models that can be used for the stochastic element. It is noted that as the deterministic terms can be built up from components, so to, using quantile functions, can the stochastic element. The model may thus be treated in both modelling and fitting as a unity. Some evidence is presented to justify the use of a much wider range of distributional models than is usually considered and to emphasize their flexibility in extending regression models.

In the Company of Geneticists

This is a book about the history of genetics, mostly focusing on classical aspects. This historical work provides a more detailed look into the history of genetics that will benefit anyone studying or teaching the subject, particularly undergraduate instructors who could then provide various angles about pivotal discoveries. James Schwartz, an independent scholar, begins his detailed and well-researched book dealing with Charles Darwin and Francis Galton—slowly treading into pivotal discoveries that took place mostly in Europe. The second part of the book takes the reader to the United States and concentrates on the work done on chromosomes using the fruit fly in Thomas Hunt Morgan's lab and the significant applications that emerged from such work. Only the Epilogue deals with advances in molecular genetics.

Sources of Wilhelm Johannsen’s Genotype Theory

This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation (For instance, W. Provine, 1971. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Mayr, 1973; F. B. Churchill, 1974. Journal of the History of Biology 7: 5-30; E. Mayr, 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; J. Sapp, 2003. Genesis. The Evolution of Biology. New York: Oxford University Press) his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen's concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group - species, subspecies, elementary species - by representing a certain underlying type (S. Müller-Wille and V. Orel, 2007. Annals of Science 64: 171-215). Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term "genotype" was introduced in W. Johannsen's 1909 (Elemente der Exakten Erblichkeitslehre. Jena: Gustav Fischer) treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological "type" distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier (W. Johannsen, 1903. Ueber Erblichkeit in Populationen und reinen Linien. Eine Beitrag zur Beleuchtung schwebender Selektionsfragen, Jena: Gustav Fischer, pp. 58-59). The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen's studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a "substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen's phenotype-genotype distinction" (Churchill, 1974, p. 24) from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen's earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others (Johannsen, 1903). They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen's paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton's law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others.

Agreement between methods

Before new tests are implemented, it is important to compare their results with those of other measurement methods that are already in use. In the determination of this so-called agreement between methods, one may choose between several statistical approaches. The correlation coefficient is a popular approach to determine the agreement between measurement methods. It is easy to calculate, but has important limitations: it does not provide any information on the type of association and it is extremely sensitive to the range of values within the study. Finally, a correlation coefficient does not reveal whether any difference between two measurements is systematic or random. Therefore, it is highly preferable to use Bland-Altman plots instead, as these reveal both systematic and random errors. Bland-Altman plots are also preferable in case of repeated measurements and calibrations.

The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine (review)

Reviewed by: The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine Hannah Decker (bio) The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine. By Mitchell B. Hart. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 264 pp. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conception of the Jews as having unhealthy, diseased bodies was widely held within European—and to some extent general Western—culture. This has been well documented in various publications, perhaps most frequently by Sander Gilman.1 Mitchell Hart, the author of the book under present review, has also contributed to the literature on Jewish pathology.2 But now Hart has written a book about authors who considered Jews to be healthy, covering approximately the century from 1850–1950. The rise of bacteriology and other subfields of microbiology in the nineteenth century raised awareness in Western societies of germs and other pathogens. Therefore, there arose an interest among attentive populations in what they had to do to be healthy and not succumb to the dangers [End Page 237] around them. (Of course, these scientific discoveries led antisemites to now vilify Jews as "bacilli.") In this context, scientists of microbiological discoveries, like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, became celebrities. Both non-Jewish writers as well as Jewish ones took a piercing look at Jews and asked why had they survived for so long a time as a "race." (Jews as a race was another new scientific and eventually political preoccupation.) The conclusion was that "ancient Hebrew society had already possessed much of the medical wisdom of modern practitioners" (31). In this light, there were a number of authors who redefined Moses as a microbiologist and "sanitarian" and urged all Western peoples to follow the hygienic practices he laid out for Jews in his law code. These authors also viewed the rabbis of the Talmudic period and medieval Jewish thinkers as contributing to Jewish health so that as a result Jews were immune to tuberculosis and other illnesses. This immunity, of course, did not exist, although Jews promulgated the allegation as a tool to combat antisemitism. Some Jewish writers even had the goal of rebutting those who "insisted on the racial and cultural superiority of Greeks/Aryans" (55). In addition, eugenicists and social Darwinists pointed to the longevity of the Jewish race as an example of a people whose laws had sound eugenic principles that had kept them "pure." Abraham, Moses, and the rabbis were translated into ancient versions of the Darwinists and eugenicists, like Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, on the issues of struggle and natural selection and Jewish health and survival. In particular, it was concluded that "the ghetto had prepared Jews for the Darwinian struggle for existence and produced positive eugenic qualities" (132). I would like to make two comments on Hart's work. The first is that in The Healthy Jew, he unearths some interesting and valuable information about the influence of nineteenth-century biology on the conception of Jews, as well as on a particular variety of antisemitism. But the constant repetition of this information is wearisome. As I thought about writing this review, I could not help ponder that Hart might have better served his audience with a lengthy journal article. He might even have reached a broader audience in the right journal, beyond the borders of Jewish history, where the wider implications of his subject would be more quickly known. My second comment is that Hart does not address an important issue. The primary and secondary literature on Jews as dirty and diseased is extensive. Hart's evidence of the opposite sometimes relies on long expositions of a few books, in spite of what is in his bibliography. I, and other readers I am sure, would like to know what the balance was. I think Hart is in a good position to write in the future about this, and [End Page 238] I hope he does. We know that Nazi antisemitic rhetoric won out for a while in certain important sectors. But ultimately, what impression were German, French, British, and American audiences left with, and what is the legacy of these competing views today? Hannah Decker University of Houston...

A beauty-map of London: Ratings of the physical attractiveness of women and men in London’s boroughs

In 1908, Francis Galton discussed anecdotal data he had collected for the compilation of a ‘beauty-map of the British Isles’. Based on his discussion, the present study attempted to compile a more empirical beauty-map of London. A community sample of 461 Londoners completed a questionnaire in which they rated the physical attractiveness of women and men in London’s 33 boroughs, as well as their familiarity with those boroughs. Results showed a significant interaction between borough and rated sex, with women being rated as more attractive across boroughs, and three boroughs in particular (the City of London, the City of Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea) being rated high in physical attractiveness. Overall, ratings of attractiveness were significantly positively correlated with familiarity of boroughs, as well as objective measures of borough affluence (specifically, annual gross pay and average house prices) but not of borough health (life expectancy). These results are discussed in relation to the association between wealth and attractiveness, as well as Galton’s original beauty-map.

Francis Galton: eugenia e hereditariedade

The eugenic proposals have been frequently interpreted as racist and prejudiced positions, based in a pseudoscientific vision of the specificities of human beings. However, Francis Galton, founder of the eugenic, looked for to present it as the science that would supply the theoretical bases not only to understand the mechanisms of the transmission of the characters between the generations, as well to contribute positively for the improvement of the characteristics of the population set. This text, therefore, intends to approach the proposal of Galton looking for to present it as the attempt of elaboration of a theory worried not only in offering beddings for the understanding of the heredity, as also indicating selecting procedures of them to improve characteristics, fomenting its proliferation, and of the considered degenerative characteristics, with the intention to hinder its occurrence in the population set.

Model Organisms: Guinea Pigs & Co.

Model Organisms: Guinea Pigs & Co.

John Stuart Mill, innate differences, and the regulation of reproduction

In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton’s work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy. The central figure in these earlier debates—as well as many later ones—was the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s view, human nature was fundamentally shaped by history and culture, factors that accounted for most mental and behavioral differences between men and women and among people of different classes, nationalities, and races. Indeed, Mill’s whole program of social reform depended on the assumption that human differences were not fixed by nature. To identify the leading figures in these disputes about difference and the concrete context in which they occurred, we explore three debates in which Mill played a key role: over the capacities and rights of women, the viability of peasant proprietorship in India and Ireland, and the status of black labor in Jamaica. The last two draw our attention to the important colonial context of the nature–nurture debate. We also show that ideas that for us seem of a piece were not always linked for these earlier thinkers, nor did views on innateness necessarily have the political correlates that we now take for granted.

Mistakes concerning a chance encounter between Francis Galton and John Venn

A chance encounter at Bournemouth between Francis Galton and John Venn has lain in some obscurity because of a slip by Galton himself and a second mistake by Karl Pearson. The contact with Venn provides insight into the development of Galton's perception of statistical dispersion, his disenchantment with the notion of ‘probable error’ and adoption of population variability.

A new perspective on Darwin’s Pangenesis

In 1868 Charles Darwin proposed Pangenesis, a developmental theory of heredity. He suggested that all cells in an organism are capable of shedding minute particles he called gemmules, which are able to circulate throughout the body and finally congregate in the gonads. These particles are then transmitted to the next generation and are responsible for the transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring. If any cells of the parent undergo changes as a result of environmental change, they will consequently transmit modified gemmules to their offspring. Soon after Darwin's pangenetic theory was published, Francis Galton designed a series of blood transfusion experiments on differently pigmented rabbits to test its validity. He found no evidence in support of the existence of Darwin's gemmules and the concept of Pangenesis was largely abandoned. In this article, recent reports of successful induction of heritable changes by blood transfusion are reviewed. Detection of circulating nucleic acids and prions in plant sap and animal blood is considered as fresh evidence for the existence of gemmules. It is now apparent that a considerable revision of views on Darwin's Pangenesis must occur before a new comprehensive genetic theory can be achieved.

The Answer Depends on the Question: A Reply to Eric Jensen

THE QUESTION that Eric Jensen addresses in his article is whether brain research can provide a basis for educational practice. He debates John Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and argues that brain research can, in fact, provide a basis for what educators do. Most of Jensen's article is devoted to showing ways in which brain research can provide a basis for educational interventions. Wrong question. The question is not whether educators can take brain-based or other biological research and derive educational implications from it. The right question is whether they can take such research and derive unequivocal educational implications. If not, then we have metaphor, but we do not really have science--or at least, not the kind of science that prescriptively is going to help us design educational interventions. Consider an important example. Is there a general ability that dominates over all others, (1) or are there multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of the others, that work in tandem with one another, but that are coequal in importance? Howard Gardner has presented an impressive array of neuropsychological evidence in favor of multiple intelligences. (2) This work is cited and discussed in the Jensen article. At the same time, John Duncan has supplied targeted evidence in support of a general factor and has even identified in the brain the alleged loci in the lateral frontal cortex. (3) Duncan's initial article was published in Science, one of the most prestigious journals in all of the sciences. A second article was published in another highly prestigious journal, Cortex. There is actually a much more extensive literature claiming that general intelligence can be localized in one part or another of the frontal cortex. So what can we conclude from brain research? We can conclude either that children can be ordered on a unidimensional scale that pretty much captures their different abilities to succeed in school, or we can conclude the opposite. Thus brain research does indeed have implications for education. What they are, however, depends in large part upon one's preferred ideology. Okay, maybe I picked a loser example. So let's try another question. Is intelligence correlated with brain size? Stephen Jay Gould ridiculed this notion and claimed that the evidence for it was absurd. (4) Yet there is evidence that suggests that there is a relationship. The idea that the size of the brain may relate to intelligence was proposed by Paul Broca nearly a century and a half ago and was reintroduced by Francis Galton a generation later. (5) Brain size is a rough proxy for processing capacity, but a proxy for brain size is head size. The correlation between head size and brain size in adults has been estimated variously, with .60 a typical estimate. (6) In infants and young children, the correlation is higher. (7) Generally positive correlations have been found between various measures of head size and I.Q. A meta-analysis of 35 studies with 54 independent samples and 56,793 participants revealed correlations ranging from .02 to .54, with a mean of .19. (8) Thirty-six of the 54 correlations were statistically significant. Of course, a more accurate estimate of the relationship of brain size to I.Q. can be obtained by using brain-imaging techniques that directly study the size of the brain. A meta-analysis of 15 samples with a total N of 657 revealed an unweighted mean correlation of .40. These data suggest, again, that there is some correlation. Where do these results leave us? Well, it appears that either there is or there is not a relationship between brain size and intelligence. Let's say, for the sake of argument, there is. What is the cause? Perhaps that is the more important question. Why do people have different head or brain sizes? Experience plays some role. Work by William Greenough and by Marian Diamond shows that experience can alter the structure and therefore the function of the brain. …

Sir Francis Galton and the Roots of Eugenics

The Law of Half-Intended Effects deserves to be more widely known. It usefully describes what happens to men who act intentionally, and who know more-or-less what they intend, but are shocked when things suddenly get out of control. If only he had lived long enough Sir Francis Galton’s enthusiastic promotion of eugenics might have been a good example of this—in some ways it began benignly enough. But its author never saw the grim conclusion: the shock of the ‘final solution’ was kept for its victims and for us. Galton was born in 1822 and died in 1911. Between those dates he explored and mapped part of Africa, wrote bestselling books about travel, was a member of the Athenaeum and actively participated in the affairs of England’s Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, and British Association, invented psychometrics, discovered correlation and regression, and in the words of Nicholas Wright Gillham’s 2001 biography “helped to found and nurture the statistical methods that today have extremely broad applications in many fields including human genetics.” He was largely responsible “for the development of fingerprinting as a forensic method and made important contributions to psychology, especially in the case of mental imagery.” A matter not discussed in two recent biographies, perhaps because Freud has fallen into disrepute, is the remarkable fact that he at least suggested—simultaneously with Freud and perhaps even before Freud—the importance of unconscious processes in our mental life. This list may be incomplete but it must do. Galton had that rarest of all things human, an original mind, and it is quite possible that no scientist before or since has made so many lasting contributions to so many fields. When half way through his life The Origin of Species appeared, in 1859, this became a turning point. There was already a family bond and a background of shared interests—Charles Darwin was a cousin. Coming at a critical stage of both his scientific career and his domestic life, the effect of Darwin’s book was nothing less than momentous, shattering his religious beliefs and turning him away from geographical concerns towards psychological and biological research. In his autobiographical Memories of My Life Galton wrote that: “The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.” Galton wrote of Darwin’s book that he “devoured its contents and assimilated them as fast as they were devoured, a fact which may be ascribed to an hereditary bent of mind that both its illustrious author and myself have inherited from our common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.” The phrase “a hereditary bent of mind” is noteworthy. In his 2001 book Gillham says that right from the start Galton seems “to have been convinced that nature, and not nurture, determined human ability”: in 1859 Darwin provided this conviction with theoretical justification and focus. From that time on he proceeded to investigate, he said later, matters “clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.” The two topics—heredity and racial improvement—are however not inseparable. Why was it that the human race Soc (2008) 45:170–176 DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9058-8

The Life and Labors of Francis Galton: A Review of Four Recent Books About the Father of Behavioral Statistics

educational statistics, that individual is Francis Galton. Galton was not a great mathematical statistician; he made no important contributions to that field. In fact, his efforts to earn an honors degree in mathematics at Cambridge resulted in a physical and mental breakdown (Gillham, 2001). The contributions that jus tify Galton's status as father?or grandfather?of the field are based on his rediscovery of statistical methods and his application of those methods to the measurement of the mental and physical characteristics of humans. Galton deserves credit for our use of such basic analytic frameworks as percentile rank, correlation, and regression. He was not the first to describe the mathematical relationship represented by the correlation coefficient, but he rediscovered this relationship and demonstrated its application in the study of heredity, anthropol ogy, and psychology. He is responsible for the term correlation (from co relation), he discovered the phenomenon of regression to the mean, and he is responsible for the choice of r (for reversion or regression) to represent the cor relation coefficient. Galton developed statistical applications for the behavioral sciences. He demonstrated the importance of the normal distribution and the normal cumula tive frequency distribution in understanding human characteristics. Through this research and his influence on Karl Pearson (who provided a mathematically superior alternative to Galton's formulation of the correlation coefficient), Galton influenced Student (William G?sset), R. A. Fisher, and the applied sta tisticians that have followed.

GALTON'S QUINCUNX: RANDOM WALK OR CHAOS?

In 1873 Francis Galton had constructed a simple mechanical device where a ball is dropped vertically through a harrow of pins that deflect the ball sideways as it falls. Galton called the device a quincunx, although today it is usually referred to as a Galton board. Statisticians often employ (conceptually, if not physically) the quincunx to illustrate random walks and the central limit theorem. In particular, how a Binomial or Gaussian distribution results from the accumulation of independent random events, that is, the collisions in the case of the quincunx. But how valid is the assumption of "independent random events" made by Galton and countless subsequent statisticians? This paper presents evidence that this assumption is almost certainly not valid and that the quincunx has the richer, more predictable qualities of a low-dimensional deterministic dynamical system. To put this observation into a wider context, the result illustrates that statistical modeling assumptions can obscure more informative dynamics. When such dynamical models are employed they will yield better predictions and forecasts.

Sir Francis Galton and Proficiency Testing in Cytopathology

Data from the National Cytology Proficiency Testing Update show that as of January 31, 2006, 9% of 12,786 examinees failed the test on the first attempt. For the second attempt, the failure rate among those who had initially failed remained surprisingly similar, 10%, although common sense would dictate that it should be much higher among those who have already failed the test once and should have lower professional skills. What is the reason for this remarkable improvement in performance? There is a simple explanation: this is a statistical phenomenon, known as "regression toward the mean." Two groups of examinees earn failing scores during proficiency testing: those whose skills are really insufficient and those who are competent but who achieved lower scores due to random variation in the test results. The latter, "misclassified" examinees subsequently "regress" toward the mean during the second test; that is, their test results become more commensurate with their genuine skills. Since the failure rates of all participants during the first and second attempts were similar, we must assume that the majority of the examinees who failed on the first attempt fall into the second, misclassified group, and only a minority have truly insufficient skills.

Times of triumph, times of doubt: science and the battle for public trust

Introduction PART 1: THE DIVERSE MORAL AND ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF BASIC AND APPLIED SCIENCE 1. Why Science Is Sometimes Perceived as Evil 2. The Tools of Judgment: Ethics and Moral Traditions PART 2: THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN SHAPING SCIENCE 3. Evil at Its Worst: Nazi Medicine and Biology 4. The Banality of Evil: The Careers of Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin 5. Heroes with Feet of Clay: Francis Galton and Harry Clay Sharp PART 3: WARTIME AND THE THREAT OF WAR AS JUSTIFICATION FOR SUSPENDING ETHICAL AND MORAL BEHAVIOR BY SCIENTISTS 6. Radiation in Peace and War 7. Herbicides in Peace and War PART 4: REGULATION OF SCIENCE TO PROTECT INDIVIDUAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH 8. Thalidomide-Corporate Misconduct Masquerading as an Act of God 9. A Synthetic Estrogen with Harmful Outcomes PART 5: THE NECESSITY OF REGULATION TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT 10. Pesticides and the Environmental Movement 11. Genetically Modified Foods-As Usual PART 6: BASIC AND APPLIED RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 12. Medical Deception and Syphilis 13. Prenatal Diagnosis and an Alleged Eugenics through the Back Door 14. Cloning, Stem Cells, Hyperbole, and Cant 15. Assisted Reproduction and the Argument of Playing God PART 7: ASSESSING BAD OUTCOMES 16. Quantifying Evil or Bad Outcomes 17. Science, History, and Responsibility 18. How Science Changes Our Worldview for the Better 19. How Can Good Intentions Avoid Bad Outcomes? Index

Science, Religion, and the Cartographies of Complexity

May/June 2007 · Historically Speaking 15 Science, Religion, and the Cartographies of Complexity David N. Livingstone There is no surer guide to the territory of science and religion than John Hedley Brooke. He is a superlative cartographer . For several decades he has pioneered the way into this forbidding terrain and mapped its intricate topography with both subtlety and precision. His work has shaped my own endeavors at every scale. On the most trivial level he has furnished me with yet another alliterative term for a lecture aimed at general audiences on the historical relations between science and religion . To conflictand cooperation, social competition, and ideological continuity as ways of thinking about the encounter, I have been able to add complexity as by far the best way of getting a handle on the issues involved. At a different scale, he has infected me with what I would call the Brookean allergy to "isms." Brooke's emphasis on the need to disaggregate big concepts and comfortable labels—Baconianism, Newtonianism , Anglicanism, Darwinism, Inductivism, to name but a few—has secured at least one enthusiastic disciple. For these labels conceal as much as they reveal. Like the words "science" and "religion" themselves, such terms are what WB. Gallie famously called "essentially contested concepts"; they defy specification in terms of transcendent necessary and sufficient conditions.' Brooke is also the master of delicious irony. Time and time again in his many writings, readers are brought face to face with the unexpected, with what ought not to have happened, with individuals ending up on the wrong sides in debates. In this role, Brooke emerges as an iconoclast in the best sense, demythologizing the icons of science and religion alike. The champions of secular science and religious faith need to be made more aware of the kinds of stories he tells. The enthusiastic coterie of latter-day Darwinians intent on canonizing Darwin and Huxley , for example, need to acknowledge the racism and sexism that snake their way through evolution's most sacred texts. Darwin, for example, rejoiced that the Anglo-Saxons would "almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world" and happily called on the support of his eugenicallyobsessed cousin, Francis Galton, to insist that "if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society."' For their part, latter-day creationists, forever complaining about the evils of Social Darwinism, need to be reminded that creationism has been a bulwark of racial prejudice and supremacist ideology. Louis Agassiz, for example, whose name frequently crops up in works of creationist apologetic, was convinced that the different races had each been specially created and displayed a distinctive hierarchy of moral and intellectual excelA fundamentalist cartoon on the cover of B. H. Shadduck's Puddle to Paradise, 1925. lence. And anti-Darwinian, conservative Presbyterians in the American South had no trouble securing biblical legitimacy for their belief that slavery and racial hierarchy were divinely sanctioned.' Attending to complexities of this sort casts new light on episodes that loom large in the traditional iconography of science-and-religion encounters. The Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1 925 is a case in point. The formulaic portrayal of this affair as redneck resistance to enlightened science has no doubt served the needs of ideologues of various hues, but mostly at the expense of ignoring the fact that the textbook in question, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), appended to its popularization of evolution declarations insisting that Caucasians were the highest human type and that eugenic practices should be installed to wipe out what he called social "parasitism and its cost to society." Given these professions, it is hardly surprising that the "Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan, Democratic candidate for the American presidency, would find the book obnoxious . Comfortable stereotype does not serve us well here at all. It is precisely the realization that history does not fit preconceived templates that has impelled Brooke to privilege complexity and contradiction over predictability and preconception. And indeed he is entirely right to disavow the suggestion that he is the father of a "complexity thesis." For complexity is not to...

Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965 (review)

Reviewed by: Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 Bill Luckin (bio) Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965. By Mark Aldrich . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+446. $59.95. In newspapers, magazines, penny-dreadfuls, early newsreels, and silent movies, the train accident looms larger than any other image of dangers associated with the machine and the new industrial age. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch and others have shown, fear of intense mental and bodily shock haunted the nineteenth-century imagination. Collapsing bridges, which Mark Aldrich discusses in depth in this pioneering study, symbolized the possibilities and threats of the most advanced material culture the world had ever seen. Landslides, leading to derailment, underscored the fragility of relationships between obstinately uncontrollable nature and an increasingly mechanized society. Most studies of railway accidents have focused on large-scale and sensationally shocking miscalculations and mishaps. Such events have long been memorialized in an arcane and specialist literature sporting titles like "Great Train Disasters" and "Memorable Derailments in the Midwest." Aldrich admits to a long love affair with all things to do with the railroad; however, in this study he is concerned with weightier matters. One of the onerous tasks he has set himself—the construction of a statistical inventory of all kinds of rail-associated accidents in the United States between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s—is daunting indeed. The findings, and fine detail of methodologies used and assumptions and back-projections brought into play, are presented in a series of appendixes; succinct overviews, summarizing trend, cause, and spatial aspects, are included in the main body of the text. Aldrich's three main sets of sources—material dug out at the collections of the Hagley Museum and Library and other repositories, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and figures from a sample of individual though unrepresentative states—begin at different dates, give priority to different kinds of accidents, and were collected for different reasons. The author says that his conclusions should be taken with a pinch of salt, but he is overmodest. Careful scrutiny suggests that these findings will not be rapidly or easily refuted. Throughout the period between the late 1820s and the 1870s, single-track American railroads—undercapitalized, overly dependent on inferior track work, often lacking basic signaling equipment, and overburdened with astonishingly dangerous freight carriers—were greatly more threatening to life and limb than their British counterparts. As zealously antiregulatory advocates of the industry explained, the aim was less to please "aesthetes" than to build as rapidly as possible at minimum reasonable cost. [End Page 448] The British safety record, which features heavily both in Aldrich's text and appendixes, clearly provides the best available yardstick against which to evaluate the American experience. Nevertheless, greater attention might have been paid to Continental Europe, and particularly to France and Belgium. Early sections of Aldrich's study contain intriguing non-British-derived reaction to the American system, but this comparative dimension is not sustained in later sections of the book. Most observers expressed incomprehension at the apparent absence of even a modicum of regulation. However, in the mid-1850s, Francis Galton told the British government that the American system—or nonsystem?—was well fitted to the needs of the American people. "[A] rough and ready cheap railway . . . entails increased cost for maintenance," he argued, "[but] is preferable to a more expensive and finished line" (p. 13). Aldrich himself identifies elements of state intervention during the dark days between the 1830s and 1870s. At the same time, he casts doubt on the commonsensical assumption that enforced, across-the-board introduction of technical best practice would necessarily have reduced the toll of death and injury. He also argues that, during the early and mid-nineteenth century, economic considerations—and particularly the heavy cumulative costs associated with compensating accident victims—gradually forced the industry to embark on the long road toward improved safety. This would involve interaction between the industry and state and federal government, the gradual replacement of bootstrap by scientifically based technical knowledge, increasing realization that accidents sapped profits, and a major cultural shift—already identified by Thomas Haskell—toward a...

Galton, Cayley, and the land across the river

The practical measurement of distance on land and sea has been of enduring interest for millennia. Here we outline a brief interaction between Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Arthur Cayley (1821-95) in which they too put the ‘geo’ back into geometry.Galton wanted to measure everything. In the adventurous life of this many-sided Victorian scientist, quantification was the hallmark of his work. In measuring geographical distances Galton used an idea suggested by Sir George Everest (1790-1866), the Surveyor-General of India in the 1830s. In the pages of the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Everest showed how to calculate the distance from one point to an inaccessible point. One application would be to measure the distance from a point on one side of a river to a point on the other side.