1822-1911

English Biologist and Statistician

Francis Galton has been called the last of the gentleman scientists—men who dabbled in science as a hobby rather than a profession. Galton was brilliant and, with hundreds of publications to his name, prolific, but he was also a dilettante—his inquiries ranged from the effectiveness of prayer to the body weights of British nobles. Many of his ventures were successful: he pioneered the use of fingerprints for identification, tested Darwin's theories, and discovered the anticyclone. But his most notable contribution to science is a source of more infamy than fame: eugenics, the study of improving a human population by selective breeding, a cause that would later be championed by bigots and genocides.

Francis Galton. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)

It is understandable that Galton would have latched on to the idea that intelligence and talent are hereditary...