Francis Galton (1822-1911)

An online museum: The Galton collection at University College in London (UK)
Galton on prayer. What do you think of his understanding of prayer? How does it resemble or differ from yours?
A wonderful web site on Galton at  http://www.mugu.com/galton/

1. Galton's first career was that of a geographer. Mapped the previously uncharted territories of Africa during a 2-year expedition (1850-1852) with the Royal Geographic Society. He had a passion for measurement.
2. Next (1860's) he also became interested in meteorology, especially in finding regularities that would improve weather prediction. He was interested in probability and prediction, an interest he carried into his studies in psychology as well.
3. Galton opened an anthropometric lab in London. and took all sorts of measurements.
   Ex: sound threshold, weight differential threshold, touch threshold, color vision, muscle strength etc….
4. He invented the scattergram (precedent for the coefficient of correlation, which his friend, Karl Pearson developed) as a way to express the relationship between two dimensions.
5. He was one of the first to apply the normal curve to human traits. He studied the normal curve extensively using a device he invented, called the quincux
6. He suggested that fingerprints be used for personal identification.
7. Invented the technique of composite drawing and composite photography.
8. He was very interested in the measurement of intelligence. He thought one could measure intelligence by the speed of a person's reflexes.
9. He is best known for his studies on the heritablity of intelligence.
   1. Hereditary Genius (1869) is his best known work.
      Galton had a strong nativistic view of intelligence, and favored some positive eugenic policies. For example, he thought that the government encourage gifted people to marry each other.
   2. A subsequent book English Men of Science (1874) looks at both nature and nurture. Galton finds for example that the Scottish school system was better than the English one.
   3. In his next book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883) Galton pionneers twin studies: homozygotic twins vs heterozygotic. Finds the homozygotic twins to be more similar.
10. Galton's WordAssociation Test: He wrote 75 words on pieces of paper, glanced quickly at each, and wrote an answer. He mixed up the pieces, did it again several times. He found that there was a constancy in the responses and thought that this showed characteristics of the mind not accessible in any other way. Did he influence Freud? We don't know.
11. Study of mental imagery, Galton sked people to imagine their sitting down to breakfast that morning. He found that the ability to imagine was distributed on a normal curve, and that many scientists had poor imagining capabilities. Hence questioned the belief that ideas came from images. Whatever ability this person had, s/he also imagined other persons had.
12. Other research; effectiveness of prayer, the nature of worship, paranoia.