STATISTICAL CRITICISM AND THE EMINENT MAN IN FRANCIS GALTON'S HEREDITARY GENIUS

Abstract

Inspired by the power and influence that Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in On the Origin of Species (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination; not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision.