Questions of the Day and of the Fray number 11: Pearson, Karl. 1922. Francis Galton, 1822-1922. A Centenary Appreciation. With Frontispiece Drawing of Francis Galton (London: Cambridge University Press). 23 pp.
Summary
This publication celebrates Galton’s legacy, focusing on his contributions to genetics and the statistical understanding of evolution. Pearson emphasizes that Galton, alongside Darwin, freed intellectual thought from “dogmatic bondage” (such as the belief in an anthropocentric universe and the 4004 B.C. date for creation).
He defends Galton’s work in heredity, noting that whether genetics follows Galton’s analysis of mass-phenomena or Mendel’s individual matings, future progress depends on the mathematical training and statistical methods that Galton originated. Pearson refutes critics who dismiss Galton’s studies as dealing only with non-hereditary “fluctuations”.
The appreciation also recounts Galton’s famous experiment on transfusion of blood between rabbits to test Darwin’s pangenesis hypothesis (the theory that “gemmules” carrying hereditary characters circulate in the body). The results showed that changing the blood had “no change whatever in the character of the offspring,” leading Darwin to clarify that gemmules were not necessarily diffused through the circulatory system. Pearson uses this episode to conclude that Galton’s method of approach must stand when studying the “mass-phenomena of racial evolution”.
Questions of the Day and of the Fray number 11
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