Some people get famous for discovering one thing, Adam Mastroianni notes, like Gregor Mendel:
Some people get super famous for discovering several things, like Einstein and Newton.
So surely if one person came up with a ton of different things — say, correlation, standard deviation, regression to the mean, “nature vs. nurture,” questionnaires, twin studies, the wisdom of the crowd, fingerprinting, the first map of Namibia, synesthesia, weather maps, anticyclones, the best method to cut a round cake, and eugenics (yikes) — they’d be super DUPER famous.
But most people have never heard of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). Psychologists still use many of the tools he developed, but the textbooks barely mention him. Charles Darwin, Galton’s half-cousin, seems to get a new biography every other year; Galton has had three in a century.
Galton’s disappearance from collective memory would have been surprising to his contemporaries. Karl Pearson (of regression coefficient fame) thought Galton might ultimately be bigger than Darwin or Mendel:
Twenty years ago, no one would have questioned which was the greater man [...] If Darwinism is to survive the open as well as covert attacks of the Mendelian school, it will only be because in the future a new race of biologists will arise trained up in Galtonian method and able to criticise from that standpoint both Darwinism and Mendelism, for both now transcend any treatment which fails to approach them with adequate mathematical knowledge [...] Darwinism needs the complement of Galtonian method before it can become a demonstrable truth…
So, what happened? How come this dude went from being mentioned in the same breath as Darwin to never being mentioned at all? Psychologists are still happy to talk about the guy who invented “penis envy,” so what did this guy do to get scrubbed from history?
I started reading Galton’s autobiography, Memories of My Life, because I thought it might be full of juicy, embarrassing secrets about the origins of psychology. I’m telling you about it today because it is, and it’s full of so much more. There are adventures in uncharted lands, accidental poisonings, brushes with pandemics, some dabbling in vivisection, self-induced madness, a dash of blood and gore, and some poo humor for the lads. And, ultimately, a chance to wonder whether moral truth exists and how to find it.
Readers of this blog — certainly the ones of proper breeding — will already know what Galton did “wrong” to end up down the memory hole.
I felt a bit embarrassed that I’d never read his biography, but I doubt I’ve ever come across a physical copy.
It is interesting that Pearson (another cancelled scientist/mathematician) did not foresee the merger of Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s Theories of Natural/Sexual/Group Selection. That was the work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky.
The punctuated equilibrium theory of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge is often viewed as an attempt to overthrow the Theory of Natural Selection. Gould and Eldredge and other critics of Darwin likeDavid M. Raup, Steven Stanley, and Stanley Rose brought a Marxist viewpoint to evolutionary theory.
Isegoria: “Readers of this blog — certainly the ones of proper breeding — will already know what Galton did ‘wrong’ to end up down the memory hole.”
Heh.