Galton Research Articles

Arthur R. Jensen (1923–2012).

Presents an obituary for Arthur R. Jensen. Arthur R. Jensen epitomized the "London School" of psychological thought, studying human individuality as a branch of biology by teaming evolutionary, genetic, and experimental/multivariate/quantitative methods to examine psychological diversity. His intellectual ancestry traces back through his mentor Hans Eysenck to Cyril Burt, Charles Spearman, and, ultimately, Sir Francis Galton. Haggbloom et al. (2002, Review of General Psychology) ranked him among the top 50 eminent psychologists of the 20th century primarily for his work on the construct of general intelligence (g) and its antecedents. But he was also known for his studies in human learning, memory, the cumulative deficit hypothesis, Spearman's hypothesis, the speed of information hypothesis, and test bias. Yet, because of the controversial nature of his work, his career was conspicuously marked by tensions: The extent to which his work was either admired or reviled by many distinguished scientists is unparalleled.

Lafcadio Hearn and Francis Galton

Lafcadio Hearn and Francis Galton

Can Psychiatry be Misused Again?

The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. While the medical community is still digesting the results, some questions are already emerging: Are psychiatrists prepared to discuss with patients and families the genetic aspect of mental illness (1)? Since genetic testing reflects probabilities and risk factors for mental illness, are patients and families able to understand that genes do not cause diseases or symptoms, but rather “conspire” with the environment to bias the individual toward a syndrome or symptom? Is the data relevant enough to be communicated even in the absence of adequate treatments? Do the offspring of mentally ill patients have the right to know the results of their genetic testing? What about the right not to know if they choose so? Can insurers or employers misuse genetic information? Are we headed toward a twenty-first century neo-eugenics? Historic View of Psychiatry Historically, psychiatry was frequently misused for political or economic gain. Science of eugenics emerged at the beginning of last century (2). It stated that the genetic pool of the population could be improved by limiting the reproductive rights and even survival of the “unfit” individuals. Psychiatrists played a crucial role in the eugenic movement in Nazi Germany. In September 1939, Hitler signed a document called “The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.” This law specified three actions to prevent the perpetuation of hereditary diseases in the German population: mental retardation, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. These actions were: Forced sterilization of “unfit” population. Children with deformities and other hereditary disorders were reported to a central registry from where a committee of academics decided who would be killed. “Action T4” was a program that targeted adult psychiatric patients for extermination (3). This euthanasia program entailed killing of patients by gas in special hospitals in the years 1939–1941, and in psychiatric hospitals in the years 1942–1945. In this latter period, patients were killed with lethal injections and through the introduction of a starvation diet. It is interesting that the elite of German psychiatry such as university professors and hospital directors decided whether a given patient would meet the criteria for the euthanasia program (3, 4). These criteria were met by individuals who: Had specific mental disorders and were unable to work, or Could carry out purely mechanical tasks, or Had continuously spent at least 5 years in an asylum, or Were kept under custody as criminally insane, or did not possess German citizenship, or Were not of the German or similar races (5, 6). American eugenics Prior to World War I eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community. The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton. Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. The essence of the concept was described in his book “Hereditary Genius,” published in 1869. Galton believed that through selective breeding human species should direct its own evolution. Others who followed Galton in principle pursued a difference approach, advocating involuntary sterilization and restrictive laws for marriage and immigration, a program often labeled “negative eugenics.” Focusing first on the mentally ill and mentally handicapped, negative eugenics expanded to embrace notions of racial inferiority (7). In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court had empowered the states to determine who should and should not be permitted to reproduce. From this point on eugenics was enforced by state laws. These family laws prohibited the marriage of “lunatics,” “imbeciles,” “epileptics,” the “insane,” and the “weak minded.” Some of these laws lingered in different states of the union in one way or another until 1980s (8, 9). Between 1907 and 1940 a total of 18,552 insane individuals were sterilized in the United States. Half of the procedures were done in California where the superintendent of the Stockton State hospital believed that marriage licenses in the general population should not be given to anyone with “a taint of insanity in his or her family” unless the person had first undergone sterilization (10). Psychiatry's desire for greater respectability in the medical profession made eugenic “science” attractive. Nathan Hale wrote in “Freud and the Americans”: “Logically, only eugenics programs could halt the apparently mounting incidence of insanity.” Barbara Sicherman, in “The Quest for Mental Health in America: 1880–1917” similarly observed that “most psychiatrists were greatly interested in the scientific study of eugenics” (10).

Nature and Nurture in Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles

GIVEN recent advances in the field of genetics, interest in the relation between biology, or human Nature if you will, and Society, or Nurture, has gained momentum, calling into question previous critical approaches that rejected biological influences out of hand. To illustrate the issues this has raised, I have chosen Jorge Amado de Faria's (1912-2001) Tent of Miracles (1969). This because not only does Amado's piece capture the cultural Zeitgeist of its times, it also, inadvertently I imagine, undermines them. I say inadvertently because Amado takes his ideas from a social constructivism we can trace back to Gilberto Freyre, and before him to Franz Boas. In the novel, Amado makes a social constructivist case in favor of miscegenation, the mixing of the races, and against these gregationist, white, Catholic, and Eurocentric ruling class of Brazil. His proxy for this alternative mixed society is the Afro-Brazilian religious construction known as candomble. Essentially the idea is that a homogeneously mixed society will resolve all social problems, primarily by eliminating divisive class and racial tensions. Paradoxically, the solution offered is predicated on biology, and so undermines a pure form of either constructivism or biologism. An example of Amado's strategy appears when the liberal white professor Frago Neto asks mulatto protagonist Pedro Archanjo how he can reconcile science and candomble. Archanjo first tries to combine these seeming contradictions into a mulatto or mixed epistemology, and then accuses the white Professor of having a narrow, rational, way of thinking. He says I'm a mixture of men and races; I am a mulatto, a Brazilian ... man is still alive in me, somewhere beyond the reach of my will, because he and I were the same person for so long (315). With the reference to his past genetic heritage in evolutionary time, Primitive man, Archanjo brings biology and genetics into the discussion. Though later in the novel Archanjo, and Amado through him, appear to argue in favor of a Boasian cultural relativism, this relativism is always undermined by Archanjo's emphasis on racial mixing, with race defined in genetic terms. Here, then, and throughout the novel, Amado's great difficulty is that of reconciling biology with social constructivism. This difficulty stems from the intellectual history of the times. As is well known, Amado was much influenced by Gilberto Freyre, who was in turn a student of Franz Boas. In 1911, with the publication of Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Franz Boas effectively eliminated the role of genetic inheritance in human behavior from the debates of the day. Boas's position was, in part, a reaction to a line of scientific thought that ran from Darwin's purely biological position to Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, from there to Francis Galton's eugenics, and finally on to Nazi distortions of Galton's ideas. When the truth about the Nazi eugenics programs began to surface, all biological explanations of human behavior became suspect, at best. The net result was that Boas's cultural relativism swept to victory in the human sciences--Emile Durkheim in sociology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner and John B. Watson in psychology, Margaret Mead in anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in linguistics, Freud in psychiatry, and so on. In fact, up to the present day, cultural relativism and social constructivism continue to form the theoretical underpinnings of the human sciences, while biological approaches languish in exile. In line with this thinking, Amado refers both to eugenics and to Boas repeatedly in Tent of Miracles (271; 169; 267) as he argues against both white supremacy and separatism and undying hatred between the races (186), and for racial equality. Indeed, it appears that Franz Boas himself was the model for the North American scholar who, in the novel, rediscovers Pedro Archanjo's lost works, one James D. Levinson of Colombia University: . …

Recepcja i rozwój idei eugenicznej na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku

Nowadays people confine eugenics to one period (The Second World War), and one place (Nazi Germany). But the truth is that eugenics existed in almost every country, including Poland. In the 19th century, Francis Galton divided the practice of eugenics into positive and negative categories. In Poland, the first of the two had greater popularity, but the negative category had its supporters too. From the beginning, Polish eugenics was associated with the political and social situations in the country. After 123 years of annexation and after The First World War, Poland was threatened by a demographic disaster. The eugenicists tried to solve those problems. Doctor Leon Wernic arose to be the leader of the eugenicists. He was the initiator of many reforms in the +eld of medicine, education, and law. =e eugenicists have established marriage counseling and even insisted upon conscious maternity. However as racist slogans become more frequent in the lead-up to the Second World War, most Polish Eugenicists were opposed to sterilization, castration, and the elimination of people.

Darwinian Disease Archaeology: Genomic Variants and the Eugenic Debate

INTRODUCTIONNotwithstanding his provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, Darwin never developed a plausible or reliable theory of the mechanism of inheritance. ' In 1 87 1 in The descent of man Darwin argued against the polygenic scientific racism of the nascent discipline of Victorian anthropology which asserted that different human races were separately created species.2 He argued alternatively for a common descent of humans from a monogenic ancestry and that differentiating characteristics such as skin, eye or hair colour were, like customs, knowledge and beliefs, the result of social rather than forces of change. He also argued that mental states such as sympathy, empathy and altruism were the result of evolution and were not exclusively human.3 Darwin's arguments about the evolutionary forces underlying human development created an opportunity for the emergence of Social Darwinism which embraced Herbert Spencer's theory of progressive social evolution depending upon the 'survival of the fittest'.4 Social Darwinism proposed that charitable preservation of the vulnerable would allow the 'unfit' to procreate leading to inevitable human decline. Darwin disagreed with the premises of Social Darwinism arguing that preservation of the 'unfit' demonstrated the evolutionary development of mental emotions such as compassion.5The influence of breeding and heredity upon human evolution and survival was analyzed using statistical correlation by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who called his discipline Eugenics. Galton argued that Eugenics studied human heredity in order to manipulate human breeding to influence evolutionary 'progress'.6 Darwin admired the achievements of his cousin but his own theory of evolutionary natural selection contained no teleological progressive purpose.7Throughout the twentieth century eugenic interpretation of social change as the rationale for socio-biological engineering has stimulated a tide of philosophical, sociological and political critique.8 Current critics of evolutionary explanations of human consciousness and social organization argue that reductionist models of determinism and the politics of social and engineering are simply the most recent expression of eugenics in the twenty-first century.9 This critique contends that developments in genomic science will give rise to a society in which social discrimination will be determined by genetic heritage leading to new forms of social hierarchy dominated by artificially selected and genetically enhanced elites.10Contemporary human geneticists who hunt down the molecular ancestry of pathogenic disposition are twenty-first-century Darwinians using the theory of natural selection to understand variation in human disease susceptibility and drug metabolism. This paper will historicize the contemporary Darwinian disease chase in order to interrogate the radical debate it has stimulated about what the sociologist, Troy Duster, has called the potential for an unwitting biological reinscription of racist conceptualizations of race.11From the time that the nineteenth-century eugenist, E. J. Lidbetter, developed his method of genealogical-tree construction to investigate inherited 'traits',12 neither Darwinian ancestry hunting nor its radical critics have stood still. Throughout the twentieth century explanations of the relationship between human organic and social evolution have generated dynamic hegemonic conflict. An historical overview of twentieth-century eugenic debates is initially provided here to outline the context in which discourses on ancestry and race have shifted gears and directions in the last two decades.ANCESTRY OF EUGENICS AND BIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISMFrancis Galton was born in the same year as the Augustinian monk from Moravia, Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-84), who produced the famous study of the inheritance of characteristics in sweet-peas which founded the science of genetics. …

Mark Twain and the Nature of Twins

This essay examines the relationship between Mark Twain’s treatment of race in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and Francis Galton’s investigations into the relative effects of "nature and nurture" in his influential 1875 twin study. While many readings of Twain’s novel assume a shared logic underlying Twain’s literary twin plot and Galton’s scientific study, the essay analyzes the terms and conditions of both to establish critical and meaningful points of disjuncture between the two plots. It argues that the differences between the functions of look-alikes in Twain and Galton provide more insight into each author’s thoughts on race than the presumed similarities. Both thinkers approach questions of the relationship between underlying character and physical appearance through the use of look-alikes, but while Galton’s study of biological twins brackets racial difference in order to prove the heritability of underlying human character, Twain obscures the inherited natures of his changelings in order to dramatize the explanatory appeal of the illusion of race. And while a unified "nurture" during childhood was critical for the longitudinal comparison of Galton’s twin study, Twain employs a changeling plot to dramatize the social difference that race makes. Ultimately, Twain’s "twins" tell us little about the relative effects of "nature and nurture," but the narrative set in motion by their virtual twinship dramatizes the thin difference upon which race is constructed.

Book Reviews

Bhash Mazumder of Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reviews, “Heredity, Family, and Inequality: A Critique of Social Sciences” by Michael Beenstock. The EconLit Abstract of this book begins: “Explores the roles of heredity, family, and social environment in the determination of outcomes among humans, including anthropometric, psychological, behavioral, and economic outcomes. Discusses the apple and the tree—Francis Galton revisited; correlation within the family; explaining the intergenerational and sibling correlations; inequality, diversity, and family; empirical methodology; empirical knowledge on the causes of correlations within the family; where we go from here; statistics; parenting theory and child behavior; and empirical methodology. Beenstock is Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bibliography; index.”

What are we to learn from the history of eugenics?

Time is no doubt ripe for broad comparative analyses of eugenics. We need accounts of eugenics that are geographically and culturally broad and that take the whole period from late nineteenth century to the present into consideration, accounts that relate the diverse and changing meanings of ‘‘eugenics’’ to ideological, social and scientific changes during that period, not least the ideologies of knowledge that frame the politics of science. The extensive scholarly literature of the last couple of decades is poor in such overview and synthesis. Modernism and Eugenics by Marius Turda, historian at Oxford Brooks University and specialist on Southeastern Europe, is an attractive and handy book of 200 pages, with a good index, lists of literature, and footnotes to check sources and argument, just the kind of generalizing analysis that is needed. Turda wants to get beyond the biological perspective that has formed so much of the historiography of eugenics. He continues, however, to view eugenics largely through the prism of Nazi population policies. This includes a deeply critical attitude to modern science and technology— though not as pessimistic in tone as Zygmunt Baumann’s classic Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Marius Turda’s Modernism and Eugenics is the first book in a series from Palgrave Macmillan dedicated to ‘‘Modernism and ...’’ According to the series editor Roger Griffin, also historian at Oxford Brooks University and a specialist on fascism, the series is inspired by ‘‘the cultural turn’’ (ix) in historiography. Turda explains that he is follower of the methods of ‘‘conceptual intellectual history’’ as practiced by people like Melvin Richter, Michel Foucault, and Rheinhardt Koselleck and takes ‘‘modernist eugenics’’ as his guiding concept (3–4). ‘‘Modernist eugenics’’ is described as a synthesis of biology, scientism, and utopian hopes of social progress. The idealistic fervor of early eugenics is well portrayed and documented by quotations from its most famous founder, Francis Galton. He was a

Heredity, family, and inequality: a critique of social sciences

Empirical literature in disciplines ranging from behavioral genetics to economics shows that in virtually every aspect of life the outcomes of children are correlated to a greater or lesser extent with the outcomes of their parents and their siblings. In Heredity, Family, and Inequality, the economist Michael Beenstock offers theoretical, statistical, and methodological tools for understanding these correlations. Beenstock presents a comprehensive survey of intergenerational and sibling correlations for a broad range of outcomes -- including fertility and longevity, intelligence and education, income and consumption, and deviancy and religiosity. He then offers a critique of the sometimes conflicting explanations for these correlations proposed by social scientists from such disciplines as developmental psychology, sociology, and economics. Beenstock also provides an axiomatic framework for thinking about the complex interplay of heredity, family, and environments, drawing on game theory, control theory, and econometrics. Chapters 1-7 discuss such topics as the important contributions of Francis Galton (1822--1911) to the statistical study of heredity, the family as an engine of inequality and diversity, and natural experiments designed to identify how environments, families, peer groups, and neighborhoods affect human outcomes. Chapters 8-10 present technical material on statistical, theoretical, and methodological tools used by the earlier chapters. Beenstock's goal is not to argue for either nature or nurture but to suggest more rigorous ways to assess the diverse contributions to this lively debate.

British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past

List of Illustrations Preface Foreword S.Fuller Acknowledgements Introduction PART I Political Economy, the BAAS and Sociology PARTII Francis Galton and the Science of Eugenics Patrick Geddes' Biosocial Science of Civics L. T. Hobhouse's Evolutionary Philosophy of Reform PART III The Origins and Growth of the Sociological Society The End of Biological Sociology in Britain Conclusion Notes Bibliography

Literature Through Recall:

Literary studies and memory studies have in common that the main objects of their interest, literature and memory, may be broken down into heuristic triads: author/text/reader and encoding/storing/retrieval, respectively. The two triads may be compared historically and even blended metaphorically, the latter being a procedure present in most human discourses, including science (see Turner 2002; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). The metaphorical blend of memory with literature, where memorizing is the source domain and writing is the target domain, has been indirectly present in Western thought since Plato’s wax tablet (see Draaisma 2001), influencing the way memory is conceptualized and explained. The opposite blend, where writing is the source domain and memorizing is the target domain, would conceptualize the writer as the encoder of meaning that is stored in a text and later recalled by a reader.1 The second metaphor has not been used nearly as widely as the first one, and the most obvious reason for that would be that the metaphor applies fully only to the writer who remembers the text that he or she had written, which limits the usefulness of the metaphor. But the primacy of the author as the most privileged interpreter of the text has been disputed for a long time in literary theory, at least since Wimsatt and Beardsley (1998 [1954]) succinctly labeled the phenomenon “intentional fallacy.” Furthermore, different interpretations of any literary text make it a reconstructive effort towards meaning constructed by various readers (the common wisdom

Commentary: Discussion of 'The History of Twins, As A Criterion Of The Relative Powers of Nature And Nurture' by Francis Galton (1875)

Commentary: Discussion of 'The History of Twins, As A Criterion Of The Relative Powers of Nature And Nurture' by Francis Galton (1875)

Forensic Science

Most forensic textbooks allot one chapter to the history of fingerprints. Beaven offers an in-depth tour through the history of fingerprints – including major and minor cases – making the history of fingerprints read like a mystery novel. He relates the intrigues and egos of key individuals, specifically the conspiracy between Francis Galton and William Herschel to deny credit to Henry Faulds for his contributions to fingerprint science. Even though the intrigues are not necessary from a historical perspective, they certainly breathe life into what some would consider a dry topic.The book is not intended to be an academic work. Rather, it was written to be a nonfiction work relating the changes in the criminal justice system of Europe – and later America – that led to the need for a way to easily and accurately identify criminals. Following a series of important criminal cases, the United Kingdom adopted fingerprints as a means of identification and, a few years later, so did America.The U.K. has a bloody history of dealing with criminals, including hanging and other torturous methods. Because a dead criminal cannot commit another crime, recidivism rates were low. But death is final, so judges would mete out merciful sentences, such as a period of imprisonment, for minor criminals. This led to the creation of prisons. Because criminals were being released back into society, rather than being buried, society became aware of the repeat offender. Parliament decreed that repeat offenders should be given harsher punishments, but police did not have a reliable means of identifying criminals. Repeat offenders could change their name to avoid harsher sentences.For the next 20 years, several men struggled to devise a reliable system for identification. Alfonse Bertillion applied anthropological techniques for describing populations to the description of criminals. Although this later proved to be a flawed technique, it achieved initial success. The use of eyewitness testimony proved the fallibility of someone’s ability to distinguish between two people who look similar. Adolf Beck, a wealthy copper-mine owner, was convicted of robbery by eyewitness testimony. After he served five years in jail, it was later determined that someone else, who looked similar, was guilty. Fingerprints can distinguish between two people who look alike – even twins.Herschel worked as Inspector General in India and used fingerprints as a means of identifying the Indian population to decrease rebellion against the Crown. Fingerprints were used for one year before Herschel returned to the U.K. and the practice was abandoned.Faulds, a Scottish physician, performed experiments removing the skin from the fingers; he showed how fingerprints grow back in the same pattern as before. This proved the permanence and uniqueness of fingerprints to an individual. He published his findings before anyone else.Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, conspired with Herschel to promote themselves – instead of Faulds – as pioneers of fingerprint science. Beavan described Galton as a self-serving elitist who “treated with ingratitude and callousness both those who helped him win his prestige and those who through hard work had won acclaim of their own” (p. 97).Galton and others were knighted for their contributions. Fauld’s contributions were recognized by the British government posthumously by a secret monetary payment to his daughters.Although this book was published 10 years ago, the history of fingerprints has not changed significantly since then. Beaven includes an epilogue that relates the current use of DNA analysis as a means of identification. DNA analysis has made tremendous strides since the publication of this book, so care should be exercised when reading this particular chapter.This book is well written, but its readability, at times, can obscure the sequence of events. Beavan points out numerous interesting connections between people and places, but this can cause some confusion as to what took place when. A timeline is included at the beginning of the book to help readers keep the sequence of events in mind. Beavan has used credible sources to build his work and includes source notes for each chapter in addition to the bibliography.Beaven wrote this book for anyone interested in the history of fingerprinting and how its acceptance by the police inaugurated the forensic science profession. The material is suitable for secondary students through adult readers. Many popular forensic science books present cases that are gruesome or inappropriate for younger audiences, but this one does not. The materials upon which Beavan builds the book also make it appropriate for forensic scientists and lawyers.

Commentary: Francis Galton, twins and intelligence

Commentary: Francis Galton, twins and intelligence

Commentary: Francis Galton and the twin method

Commentary: Francis Galton and the twin method

Commentary: The birth of the twin study--a commentary on Francis Galton's 'The History of Twins'

In this passage, the primary stirp is the stirp of a zygote immediately after it has been fertilized and the secondary stirps of monozygotic twins are their stirps immediately after the zygote has divided into two. Galton explains the similarities of three classes of twins as follows. (i) Monozygotic twins who divided shortly after conception are very similar because they have very similar secondary stirps derived from the division of the same primary stirp, and these secondary stirps develop in very similar conditions. (ii) Dizygotic twins and siblings are moderately similar because they are derived from very similar primary stirps, which develop under somewhat similar conditions. No prediction is made about the degree of similarity. (iii) Monozygotic twins who divided a considerable time after conception are very dissimilar because the primary stirp, which divides into two, has been organized into contrasting halves. Galton could not in 1875 have invented the classical twin method based on this non-Mendelian theory of heredity. What he did was to track the life-history changes of twins to see whether twins who were very similar at birth diverged in later life or whether twins who were very dissimilar at birth converged later, as a test of the relative importance of nature and nurture. The classical twin method of comparing the similarities of monozygotic and dizygotic twins on Mendelian assumptions was first used in the 1920s.

Francis Galton's Face Project: Morphing the Victorian Human

This essay complicates standard readings of Francis Galton's composites by examining his objectives for photography in relation to his work in heredity and to his interest in mapping the body in terms of novel codes and patterns. As new additions to the visual rhetoric of photography, Galton's composite photographs reformulate, stretch, and decenter the human subject. Galton's family composites, for instance, show singular bodies retaining the traces of other bodies that share a similar heredity. These images thus represent in visual terms the individual human as the sum of past evolution and of the action of nature, which works to pressure and shape human and animal development.

THE BIOLOGIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST: HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN'S EARLY MENTAL ABILITY INVESTIGATIONS

In the early 1880s, biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted some of the first questionnaire research in American psychology. This article details how he came to distribute Francis Galton's questionnaire on mental imagery in the United States, as well as how he altered it to suit his own burgeoning psychological research interests. The development and circulation of questionnaires at the very beginning of American scientific psychology, first by Osborn and later by G. Stanley Hall, is discussed in terms of the new psychology's often-overlooked methodological plurality. Further, Osborn's late nineteenth century interest in individual variation and group differences in mental imagery ability are discussed in relation to his pervasive educational and social concerns, as well as his eventual status as a prominent eugenicist in the twentieth century United States. This research into mental imagery ability foreshadows the eugenic-oriented intelligence testing that developed in the early twentieth century.

Francis Galton, measurement, psychometrics and social progress

This paper looks at Galton’s work from the perspective of its influence on subsequent developments in assessment and especially psychometric latent variable models. It describes how Galton’s views on scientific validity and assumptions about data analysis came to be incorporated into later perspectives.