Francis Galton
Why it’s called “regression.”
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
• IQ testers in the early 20th century argued over
whether Galton was
– the smartest person of his day or
– the smartest person who ever lived.
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
• Loved to count things.
• Developed the first classification system for
fingerprints
– For identifying people.
• Pioneer of statistics
– Invented “standard deviation”
First use of “regression”
• Francis Galton (1886). "Regression Towards
Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature". Journal of
the Anthropological Institute 15: 246–263.
• Galton wrote Hereditary Genius (1869)
– Darwin (after reading Galton): “… I have always
maintained that, excepting fools, men did not
differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard
work.”
– Galton: “The rejoinder that might be made to his
remark about hard work, is that character,
including the aptitude for work, is heritable like
every other faculty.”
At the time he published the
regression article …
• 1884-1890: Galton ran laboratory for
measuring heads
• Craniometry
Differences among races echoing
differences among primates?
This diagram from Samuel George Morton, 1839
“Scientific” Racism
• Explanation for men’s dominance over
women, white men’s dominance over men of
color around the world in terms of individuals’
unchangeable characteristics
– Rather than social construct
• Social science is science, too
1899, The Races of Europe
.
• Craniometry reality check:
– Men – bigger heads than women = smarter?
– Stephen J. Gould re-examined Morton’s skulls
• Ever changing methods for measuring skulls to get the
results assumed to be true
• Neoteny
Statistical concepts developed as part
of effort to make sexism and racism
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Standard deviation
Regression
Correlation coefficient (r and R2)
Factor analysis
Eugenics
• Galton invented the term in 1883
• Eu genics – inheriting good things
• Galton advocated that families should be
evaluated – given “marks” -- for “fitness”
– Money incentive for families with high marks to
have more children
• Horrors of World War II made eugenics
unfashionable
– Sterilization of defectives in the U.S.
Galton and scientific racism revived?
• The Bell Curve 1994
• Race and IQ