![]() Sadly, such views were not unusual for the period. His writings include sweeping judgements of different ethnic groups, with the Anglo-Saxons predictably perceived as superior to all others. Underlying this were Galton's views on race. But there is another side to Galton's story: his role in the rise of eugenics.Īn antique photograph of University College London, date unknown. Galton's achievements spanned other fields too: he came up with the first weather maps, pioneered fingerprinting for crime detection, and wrote hugely popular travel guides based on his explorations in Africa. Galton also developed the concept of correlation (although he was not the first to discover it), and showed how it applied to real-world data. This is the origin of the statistical term “regression”, which originally described the pattern he observed, rather than the technique he used to get there. It was this conundrum that led Galton to discover the phenomenon of regression towards the mean, observing how it applied to the size of sweet pea seeds in successive generations. Galton was wrestling with the unanswered question of how different traits stayed stable in a population over generations, building on the work of his cousin Charles Darwin, who had published On the Origin of Species in 1859. His developments and discoveries were fuelled in large part by his fascination with the science of heredity. In the world of statistics, Galton (1822–1911) is regarded as a towering figure. But that may be about to change as Galton's legacy comes back into the spotlight. Students of statistics at UCL cannot avoid him: they spend a lot of their time in the Galton Lecture Theatre. The Victorian polymath endowed the university with his personal collection and archive, and funded the creation of the Galton Chair of Genetics (formerly the Galton Chair of Eugenics). Sir Francis Galton may have died over a century ago, but for staff and students in the statistics department of University College London (UCL), his memory is ever present.
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