This section contains 607 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
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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.)](https://d22o6al7s0pvzr.cloudfront.net/images/bookrags/scit/scit_05_img0394.jpg)
It is understandable that Galton would have latched on to the idea that intelligence and talent are hereditary...
This section contains 607 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
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