author
Francis Galton
1822–1911
A restless Victorian thinker, traveler, and experimenter, he helped shape modern statistics while also giving lasting force to the deeply harmful idea of eugenics. His life sits at the crossroads of scientific curiosity, invention, and some of the most troubling assumptions of his age.
7 Audiobooks
Noteworthy families (modern science) : An index to kinships in near degrees between persons whose achievements are honourable, and have been publicly recorded
by Francis Galton, Edgar Schuster
Finger prints
by Francis Galton
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
by Francis Galton
Memories of my life
by Francis Galton
The narrative of an explorer in tropical South Africa
by Francis Galton
Essays in eugenics
by Francis Galton
About the author
Born near Birmingham in 1822, Francis Galton was an English polymath whose interests ranged widely across exploration, meteorology, anthropology, psychology, and measurement. A cousin of Charles Darwin, he became known for asking how human traits could be studied, compared, and counted, and he published extensively over a long career.
Galton is still remembered for major contributions to statistics, including work connected with correlation and regression toward the mean, and for early studies of fingerprints and human measurement. He also traveled in southern Africa and wrote about his journeys, reflecting the broad, often restless curiosity that marked much of his work.
At the same time, his legacy is inseparable from his role in developing and promoting eugenics. That idea, presented by Galton as a way to improve human heredity, later influenced discriminatory and destructive movements far beyond his lifetime. Because of that, he is studied today both as an important scientific innovator and as a figure whose work helped legitimize profoundly damaging social theories.