5/17/2023 0 Comments Galton hereditary geniusHe seized on the chance to support his half-cousin’s theory of evolution by arguing that human intelligence is a matter of brain rather than soul and that mental qualities are highly heritable. Perhaps most importantly, Galton was inspired by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. 11 Galton may also have been influenced by the mid-Victorian biological racism, which asserted that human races can be arrayed on a linear scale of inborn intelligence from the White European down to the Australian Aboriginal. The historian Raymond Fancher has speculated that Galton’s conviction that human intelligence is largely a matter of nature arose from his experience at school and university of desperately trying hard and still falling short of his personal expectations: a belief in the power of heredity perhaps rationalized his recurrent disappointments. 9 In 1883, he even coined the term ‘eugenics’. 7, 8 So convinced from the outset was he of the primacy of heredity that Galton argued repeatedly for the need for the state or its wiser citizens to seek to encourage the best to outbreed the rest. ![]() Like so many of those who preceded him, he already knew exactly what he wanted to find. With dogged determination, Galton now entered the fray. Only in the preceding century, however, had men of science begun to suspect that it might be possible to disentangle the two. Since classical antiquity scholars had been making claims about the importance of either birth or education. ![]() Nature over nurtureīy 1875, Galton had been puzzling for over a decade about how to evaluate the roles of nature and nurture. 5, 6 But most of his career was devoted to trying to better understand the nature of heredity and the degree to which inheritance determines the way we think, feel and act. And he would die, in 1911, a grand old man of science, able to reflect on the part he had played in helping to secure victories for secular science and evolution over theology and revelation. The nascent fields of statistics and criminal identification would all profit from his endeavours. This fascination for rendering complex natural phenomena down to simple numerical expressions would lead him to a series of significant advances. In Africa, he delighted in making detailed measurements of distance, calculating latitude and longitude, estimating altitude by testing the temperature of boiling water, even working out the vital statistics of a beautiful indigenous woman whom he measured from a distance using a combination of sextant, trigonometry and logarithms. 4 But even as he made the charmlessly racist observations about indigenous people typical of the mid-Victorian Briton, Galton was already showing the bent for scientific measurement and compulsive counting which were to be the hallmarks of his scientific career. On his return he wrote an account of his travels, which won him a membership to the highest circles of geographers and anthropologists. 2, 3 Partly for this reason, Galton had spent a year exploring the regions of southwestern Africa where the imperial powers of Europe were yet to extend their reach. His cranial topography suggested a flair for adventure. After a severe mental breakdown while a student at Cambridge University, in 1849 Galton turned to a phrenologist to discover where his talents might lie. ![]() Even so, he had taken some time to find his vocation as a scientist. Galton had an excellent scientific pedigree as the grandson of the poet and evolutionist Erasmus Darwin and the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. ![]() In the mid-1870s, however, he was also a rising man of English science. 1 There was nothing unusual about cutting-edge science appearing in a popular periodical: science was only gradually emerging as a profession in its own right and Galton already enjoyed a wide reputation as an African explorer. This one was printed in a general and literary journal called Fraser’s Magazine. Fittingly for a study of twins, Galton wrote a pair of very similar papers on the phenomenon in the same year. This 137-year-old paper, reproduced in this volume, represents the first detailed attempt to use the phenomenon of twinning to estimate the relative powers of nature and nurture. Now little remembered, it nonetheless has considerable historical significance. In 1875, the English scientist Francis Galton published an article entitled ‘The History of Twins’.
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