Francis Galton : Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry

by Bulmer, M. G.

• ISBN13: 9780801874031
• ISBN10: 0801874033
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-19
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

If 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.

Author Biography

Michael Bulmer is Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Chronology	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xv
A Victorian Life	p. 1
Family Background and Education	p. 1
Travels	p. 6
Eastern Europe, 1840	p. 6
The Near East, 1845-46	p. 7
South West Africa, 1850-52	p. 11
Vacation Tours	p. 18
Scientific Career	p. 21
The Royal Geographical Society	p. 22
Exploration in Central Africa	p. 23
The British Association	p. 27
Inventions	p. 28
Meteorology	p. 30
Heredity and Evolution	p. 32
Psychology	p. 32
Photography	p. 34
Fingerprints	p. 35
Characterization	p. 36
Hereditary Ability	p. 42
"Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865)	p. 44
Hereditary Genius (1869)	p. 46
English Judges	p. 48
Comparison of Results for All Professions	p. 50
Transmission through Male and Female Lines	p. 54
The Reception of Hereditary Genius	p. 57
Nature and Nurture	p. 60
English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874)	p. 60
"The History of Twins" (1875)	p. 64
Galton's Hereditarianism	p. 67
Epilogue	p. 71
Number of Kinsfolk	p. 74
Eugenics	p. 79
Galtonian Eugenics	p. 79
Later History of Eugenics	p. 84
Britain	p. 84
America	p. 87
Germany	p. 92
The Rationale of Eugenics	p. 98
The Mechanism of Heredity	p. 102
Galton's Knowledge of Heredity in 1865	p. 103
Biparental Inheritance	p. 103
The Non-Inheritance of Acquired Characters	p. 105
The Law of Reversion	p. 107
Darwin's Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis	p. 108
Reversion	p. 110
The Inheritance of Acquired Characters	p. 112
Xenia and Telegony	p. 113
Galton's Reaction to Pangenesis	p. 114
Galton's Political Metaphor of Pangenesis	p. 114
An Experimental Test of Pangenesis	p. 116
Galton's Theory of Heredity in the 1870s	p. 119
Similarities between Relatives	p. 123
Galton's Ideas on Heredity in 1889	p. 127
Discussion	p. 131
Weismann and the Continuity of the Germ-Plasm	p. 132
De Vries's Theory of Intracellular Pangenesis	p. 133
Segregation	p. 136
Blending Inheritance	p. 138
Fleeming Jenkin and the Problem of Swamping	p. 141
Four Evolutionary Problems	p. 147
The Domestication of Animals	p. 147
The Evolution of Gregariousness	p. 150
The Fertility of Heiresses	p. 153
The Extinction of Surnames	p. 156
The Evolution of Sex	p. 160
"A Theory of Heredity" (1875)	p. 161
Three Unpublished Essays	p. 163
The Charms of Statistics	p. 168
Quetelet and the Average Man	p. 169
Galton and the Normal Distribution	p. 173
Hereditary Genius (1869)	p. 173
Natural Inheritance (1889)	p. 175
The Importance of the Normal Distribution to Galton	p. 180
Galton's Quincunx	p. 182
Regression and the Bivariate Normal Distribution	p. 184
Correlation	p. 191
Two Concepts of Probability	p. 196
The Development of Statistics	p. 202
Regression Theory	p. 206
Statistical Theory of Heredity	p. 209
A Theory Based on Pangenesis	p. 210
"Typical Laws of Heredity" (1877)	p. 211
An Experiment with Sweet Peas	p. 212
Solution of the Problem	p. 215
Johannsen's Experiments with Beans	p. 218
The Inheritance of Human Height	p. 224
The Advantages of Height	p. 225
The Regression of Offspring on Mid-Parent	p. 229
Kinship	p. 231
Fraternal Regression	p. 233
Variability in Fraternities and Co-Fraternities	p. 235
The Law of Ancestral Heredity	p. 238
Galton's Formulation of the Ancestral Law	p. 239
Galton's Derivation of the Law in 1885	p. 241
Derivation of the Law in 1897	p. 244
Galton's Law As It Should Have Been	p. 247
Karl Pearson's Interpretation of the Ancestral Law	p. 250
The Ancestral Law and Mendelism	p. 257
Weldon and Mendelism	p. 259
Pearson and Mendelism	p. 261
Yule's Reconciliation of the Law with Mendelism	p. 266
The Regression on Mid-Ancestral Values	p. 272
Discontinuity in Evolution	p. 275
Galton's Theory of Discontinuous Evolution	p. 276
Stability of Type	p. 277
Perpetual Regression	p. 281
Selection Experiments	p. 284
The Fallacy of Perpetual Regression	p. 285
"Discontinuity in Evolution" (1894)	p. 288
Speciation and Saltation	p. 292
De Vries and The Mutation Theory	p. 294
Punctuated Equilibria	p. 297
Biometry	p. 299
The Demonstration of Natural Selection	p. 300
The Career of W. F. R. Weldon	p. 301
The Common Shrimp	p. 302
The Shore Crab	p. 303
Stabilizing Selection in Snails	p. 308
Bumpus's Sparrows	p. 309
Multivariate Selection	p. 312
Quantitative Genetics	p. 315
The Multiple Factor Hypothesis	p. 316
The Hardy-Weinberg Law	p. 318
Mendelian Theory of Quantitative Genetics	p. 321
The Response to Selection	p. 324
Coda	p. 327
Multivariate Selection Theory	p. 329
Selection Differentials and Selection Gradients	p. 329
The Response to Selection	p. 331
References	p. 333
Index	p. 351
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