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Author: Nicholas W. Gillham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 429
ISBN-13: 0195143655
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis vivid biography of the father of eugenics is also a superb portrait of science in the Victorian era. 10 halftones & 26 line illustrations.
Author: Nicholas Wright Gillham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-11-01
Total Pages: 429
ISBN-13: 0195349431
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFew scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as Francis Galton. He was an important African explorer, travel writer, and geographer. He was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. Now, Nicholas Gillham paints an engaging portrait of this Victorian polymath. The book traces Galton's ancestry (he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and the cousin of Charles Darwin), upbringing, training as a medical apprentice, and experience as a Cambridge undergraduate. It recounts in colorful detail Galton's adventures as leader of his own expedition in Namibia. Darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in Galton's life was the publication of the Origin of Species. Thereafter, Galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis and twin studies to argue that talent and character were inherited and that humans could be selectively bred to enhance these qualities. To this end, he founded the eugenics movement which rapidly gained momentum early in the last century. After Galton's death, however, eugenics took a more sinister path, as in the United States, where by 1913 sixteen states had involuntary sterilization laws, and in Germany, where the goal of racial purity was pushed to its horrific limit in the "final solution." Galton himself, Gillham writes, would have been appalled by the extremes to which eugenics was carried. Here then is a vibrant biography of a remarkable scientist as well as a superb portrait of science in the Victorian era.
Author: Francis Galton
Publisher: Cosimo Classics
Published: 1908
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"... hardly any other living Englishman can point to so great an amount of truly scientific work applied to some of the fundamental problems of human welfare." -G.E. Gehlke, Political Science Quarterly (1910) In Memories of My Life (1908), Sir Francis Galton provided a detailed autobiography that starts with a description of his family of origin (he was a cousin of Charles Darwin), tells about his childhood, his education, and then describes each of his travels. Chapters are also devoted to his major scientific interests, including eugenics, which he regarded as a problem that might require state control. This autobiography offers a compelling insight into the life of one of the 19th century's leading scientists.
Author: Derek William Forrest
Publisher:
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Milo Keynes
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1993-07-20
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1349122068
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'...this is a splendid, first-class book, the definitive book on Francis Galton and his legacy. The editing has been superb...The timing of its publication is excellent in relation to the increasing interest in human genetics in all areas of the biological and behavioural sciences'.R.Plomin, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Development and Health Genetics, Pennsylvania State University Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a grandson of Erasmus Darwin, was one of the most versatile men of his time. In his twenties he won fame as an explorer. He worked at the prediction of weather, and described his discovery of the anticyclone He first became an anthropologist in 1862 when he joined the Ethnological Society. He initiated anthropometry and the measurement of human variation, and the use of photography for the analysis of differencies, or individual characteristics, in a group. He recognised the uniqueness of Finger Prints, and, in 1875, first used the records of pairs of identical twins in his researches into the laws of heredity. Besides contributions to human genetics, Galton devised the correlation coefficient, and was thus concerned with the advancement of statistics. In 1883, he coined the word eugenics by which he meant 'good in birth' and 'noble in heredity', and, in 1904, he founded the Galton Laboratory at University College, London. He was first President of the Eugenics Education Society in 1907.
Author: Martin Brookes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 9780747566663
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA lively and unorthodox biography of one of the Victorian age's most eccentric and prolific scientific minds.
Author: Francis Galton
Publisher:
Published: 1879
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Sir Francis Galton
Publisher:
Published: 1870
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Francis Galton
Publisher:
Published: 1889
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Michael Bulmer
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2004-12-01
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 0801881404
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf not for the work of his half cousin Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory might have met a somewhat different fate. In particular, with no direct evidence of natural selection and no convincing theory of heredity to explain it, Darwin needed a mathematical explanation of variability and heredity. Galton's work in biometry—the application of statistical methods to the biological sciences—laid the foundations for precisely that. This book offers readers a compelling portrait of Galton as the "father of biometry," tracing the development of his ideas and his accomplishments, and placing them in their scientific context. Though Michael Bulmer introduces readers to the curious facts of Galton's life—as an explorer, as a polymath and member of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, and as a proponent of eugenics—his chief concern is with Galton's pioneering studies of heredity, in the course of which he invented the statistical tools of regression and correlation. Bulmer describes Galton's early ambitions and experiments—his investigations of problems of evolutionary importance (such as the evolution of gregariousness and the function of sex), and his movement from the development of a physiological theory to a purely statistical theory of heredity, based on the properties of the normal distribution. This work, culminating in the law of ancestral heredity, also put Galton at the heart of the bitter conflict between the "ancestrians" and the "Mendelians" after the rediscovery of Mendelism in 1900. A graceful writer and an expert biometrician, Bulmer details the eventual triumph of biometrical methods in the history of quantitative genetics based on Mendelian principles, which underpins our understanding of evolution today.
