فرانسيس غالتون

الأعمال

• 1869العبقرية الوراثية (Hereditary Genius)

  يستعمل قوائم سيرية لرجال بارزين ليجادل بأن الموهبة موروثة ويرتّب «الأعراق» بحسب قدرات مزعومة؛ وقد مهّد للبرنامج الذي سمّاه غالتون لاحقًا تحسين النسل.

الموقف

Galton is on the map as an ideologue because the history and ethics of science treat him as the founder of eugenics, while his statistical methods are still used. He held that talent and character are inherited like physical traits and that society should increase the reproduction of the “able” and decrease that of the “unfit”. In “Hereditary Genius” he ranked “races” on a scale of supposed ability, placing Africans far below the English – a racist judgement without scientific basis. The eugenics movement he founded inspired sterilisation laws in the United States, Scandinavia and Germany and was absorbed into National Socialist racial policy; historians such as Daniel Kevles (1985) describe this history. Michael Sandel (2007) criticised the eugenic drive to mastery and its return in “liberal eugenics”. In 2020 University College London removed Galton’s name from its buildings. The debate about how to treat a founder of statistics who was also the founder of eugenics continues.

الحياة والسياق

Francis Galton was born on 16 February 1822 in Birmingham into a wealthy Quaker family of bankers and gunmakers; Charles Darwin was his half-cousin. He studied medicine in Birmingham and London and mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. An inheritance in 1844 made him independent. In 1850–52 he travelled through what is now Namibia and received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his report; “The Art of Travel” (1855) became a widely used handbook. He worked on meteorology, published one of the first newspaper weather maps and described the anticyclone. After reading Darwin’s “Origin of Species” he turned to heredity: “Hereditary Genius” (1869), studies of twins, “Inquiries into Human Faculty” (1883), in which he coined the word “eugenics”, and “Natural Inheritance” (1889). He introduced correlation and regression and a classification of fingerprints that was adopted by the police. In 1904 he funded a eugenics research fellowship at University College London and bequeathed his fortune for a chair of eugenics. He was knighted in 1909 and died in Haslemere on 17 January 1911.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853)
• The Art of Travel (1855)
• Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883)
• Natural Inheritance (1889)
• Finger Prints (1892)