Galton’s methods of statistical analysis of human and family accomplishment and failures provided the central tool used by American proponents of directed human heredity.Īlthough written for a general audience, Natural Inheritance was Galton’s most technical and statistically oriented monograph. In his most important book on human characteristics and talents, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton introduced the word “eugenics,” taken from the joining of the Greek words eu (well) and genos (offspring) to become “eugenics” or the science of being wellborn. The conclusions of these plant and animal studies were extrapolated to his analysis of human heredity. Galton, like Gregor Mendel, studied inherited traits in plants using garden peas. He conducted cross breeding studies in both plants and animals. He used his statistical tools and keen sense of pattern recognition to study which human characteristics were biological and which ones derived from the surrounding environment.īeyond being a talented statistician, Galton was also an empiricist and an experimentalist. Above all else Galton was an applied mathematician who attacked problems in all disciplines including human heredity and the human faculties of genius and accomplishment. Galton published in excess of 340 papers and books during his lifetime, and he was the originator of such statistical principles as regression toward the mean and correlation. Francis Galton was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin and was widely recognized by contemporaries as one of the greatest and most prolific of Victorian-Era polymaths.
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