Galton Said It First

I picked up a copy of Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty and was absolutely staggered by his ability to anticipate so many of our modern beliefs. He also writes better than Robert Plomin and nearly as well as Jonathan Weiner and may be an ancestor of Strunk or White, so exactly do their Elements of Style follow his example.

Reading Galton or any prolific writer brings to mind the "William James Problem." That is, any reader can digest a lot of prose and find the things that verify the his original premise. Many of us read books so as to make them agree with us and pick our therapists for the same reason. Thus, to some scholars, William James anticipated nearly all of modern psychology. A similar claim can be made in regard to Freud, Jung, Charles Dickens, and the Country & Western Top 40. As David Evans learned from his father: "If you look hard enough, you could establish the case for Jack Dempsey having written the little poem 'Ozymandias.'"

The problem is analogous to a classic one in correlation, a statistic devised by Galton and patented by R A Fisher. A forecaster who always predicts rain will never be wrong when it rains. He also will have a high rate of accuracy if he lives in a place where trains a lot. His true worth as a forecaster, however, depends on his ability to predict bright sunny days when they occur. Thus, crediting James or Galton or Skinner depends not only upon noticing how they agree with us, but also their gaffs, lapses, and periodic hallucinations. (Given the high overlap between certain forms of madness and-verbal creativity, the possibility of hallucination is not necessarily a small one.)

Galton's inquiry into human faculties was reissued because the first edition was rare and only found in old bookstores at great cost. Things haven't changed a whole lot in 130 years. I paid about 80 dollars for a second edition whereas a reprinted paperback would cost me about one hundred dollars. (At that price, I intended to defend the worn volume from my own marginalia; however, I caved to my emotions and scattered blue ink generously through its yellow pages because a Mr. H. G. Hawley did so in 1912 in Idaho, marking all the anti religion passages for me in his Number 2 pencil. (A peculiar reminder of our school copy of Peyton Place in 1959: Put it down on any desktop, give her a slight breeze, and she opened the good sections in seriatum. I wish my dates had been so cooperative.)

Anyhow, Galton sometimes overstated his case and is known today more for how he was put to bad uses through strong reciprocity and less for his many insights into our very human nature. (Galton was not the first or the last to be so used. Fran Striker once told me that the Lone Ranger was also guided by "the greatest good for the greatest number. Doggone cooperator: working on me when I was 9 years old!" Oughta be ashamed!) If ideas follow genes, then Galton was related not only to Darwin but also to some characters of our modern age. Ed Wilson, Robert Wright, and even Howard Bloom appear in Galton's prose. Thomas Bouchard and Robert Plomin are evident.

Ed Wilson (on diversity) appears along with more than a little of Stu Kauffman and Brian Goodwin and perhaps some of Lynn Margulis:
"The living world does not consist of a repetition of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them, that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical circumstances of the localities they inhabit. The moral and intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious variety of the gifts of the men who compose it, and it would be the very reverse of improvement to make all its members assimilate to a common type."

Unfortunately, Galton continued the paragraph and ruined it in the same manner that might be aped by many urban residents on both left coasts of North America:
"However, in every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful. We may, of course, be mistaken about some few of these, and shall find in our fuller knowledge that they subserve the public good in some indirect manner; but, notwithstanding this possibility, we are justified in roundly asserting the natural characteristics of every human race admit of large improvement in many directions easy to specify."

(Matt Ridley in "Genome" pointed out the overlap of enforced eugenics and left politics in the troubled and still confusing early decades of this century. We won't change from 1932 Germany, some of the superior types will be more subtle the next time which should occur as resources again tighten. The eugenics people, like many academic leftists and religious rightists assume a natural order of human superiority in regard to all other life. Thus, the cortically blessed claim freedom from their genes and their memes build Platonic philosopher kingdoms once more. Individual grandiosity dates at least to Socrates and humility certainly missed at least one of my own ancestors. Group grandiosity likely sprouted with the first priesthood on an African grassland or seacoast.

Eugenics and Bob Wright and possibly Howard Bloom:
Bob and Howard talk well about nonzero sum games; cooperation beats isolation in trade and in communication. Bob discusses cultures of people, Howard does likewise but embellishes things with thoughts about cultures of bacteria. Thus, eugenics enforced by government rules instead of by dating teens will be with us again and the selection pressures will be against the nonconformist. Bee hives are in my son's and his son's futures if not in my own or Bob's or Howard's.

Galton almost missed nonshared environment although he picked up on some of its expressions if not its power. And we his followers in time if not in belief have spent our lives bickering about nature versus nurture. Robert Plomin, Arthur Jensen, and even Frans de Waal do us a favor if we cared to listen instead of defending our cemeteries. The phrase "active genotype-environment correlation" means so much even if some of us call it "active Darwinism." It also eliminates the polarities, the hoots and paper displays from old, nearly all male, academics of the past century.

p 131 "The interaction of nature and circumstance is very close, and it is impossible to separate them with precision. Nurture acts before birth, during every stage of embryonic and pre-embryonic existence, causing the potential faculties at the time of birth to be in some degree the effect of nurture."

p173 "Much stress is laid on the persistence of moral impressions made in childhood, and the conclusion is drawn, that the effects of early teaching must be important in a corresponding degree. I acknowledge that fact, so far as has been explained in the chapter on Early Sentiments, but there is a considerable set-off on the other side. Those teachings that conform to the natural aptitudes of the child leave much more enduring marks than others. Now both the teachings and the natural aptitudes of the child are usually derived from its parents. They are able to understand the ways of one another more intimately than is possible to persons not of the same blood and the child instinctively assimilates the habits and ways of thought of its parents. Its disposition is 'educated' by them, in the true sense of the word; that is to say, it is evoked, not formed by them. On these grounds I ascribe the persistence of many habits that date from early home education, to the peculiarities of the instructors rather than to the period when the instruction was given. The marks left on the memory by the instructions of a foster-mother are soon sponged clean away."

Genetic resilience:
p 172 "There is no escape from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons of the same rank of society and in the same county. My fear is, that my evidence may seem to prove too much, and be discredited on that account, as it appears contrary to all experience that nurture should go for so little but experience is often fallacious in ascribing great effects to trifling circumstances."

Genetic influence increases with age? Plomin et al (2001) illustrate such to be true for g.
p 146 in Galton: "We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly limited and that the mind continually recurs to the same instruments in conducting its operations, therefore its tracks necessarily become more defined and its flexibility diminished as age advances.

Thomas Bouchard (& Nancy Segal:)
p 159 "Two persons, both friends of a certain twin lady, told me that she had frequently remarked to them that 'kissing her twin sister was not like kissing her other sisters, but like kissing herself --- her own hand, for example'" (Segal, Entwined Lives, discusses the extreme cooperation seen between identical twins.)

p 160-161 "'There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression, that often gave to each the effect of being more like his brother than himself.'" ...'when we were first separated, the one to go to business and the other to college, our respective characters were inverted; we both think that at the time we each ran into the character of the other. The proof of this consists in our own recollections, in our correspondence by letter, and in the views which we then took of matters in which we were interested.'"

"In explanation of this apparent interchangeableness, we must recollect that no character is simple, and that in twins who strongly resemble each other, every expression in the one may be matched by a corresponding expression in the other, but it does not follow that the same expression should be the prevalent one in both cases."

p 161 7 of 35 shared ailments or some peculiarity. '...have both the defect of not being able to come downstairs quickly which, however, was not born with them, but came on at the age of twenty' Also ruptures @ birth, getting the same tooth pulled, losing hair, dying of Bright's disease within 6 months of each other.
p 162 9 of 35 got sick at the same time.

p165 Close association of ideas. 11 of 35. Same remarks, same song at the same moment, begin a sentence and the other finishes. Twin A bought a set of champagne glasses in Scotland for Twin B; B bought the same pattern for A but in England.

166 Differences in temperament: timidity vs brave. Intensity or energy, did not extend more deeply into the structure. "The more vivacious might be subdued by ill health, until he assumed the character of the other; of the latter might be raised by excellent health to that of the former. The difference was in the keynote, not in the melody."

p 167 "...in some cases the resemblance of body and mind had continued unaltered up to old age, notwithstanding very different conditions of life; and they showed in the other cases that the parents ascribed such dissimilarity as there was, wholly or almost wholly to some form of illness. In four cases it was scarlet fever, in a fifth, typhus, in a sixth, a slight effect was ascribed to a nervous fever, in a seventh it was the effect of an Indian climate; in an eighth, an illness (unnamed) of nine month's duration; in a ninth, varicose veins, in a tenth, a bad fracture of the leg, which prevented all active exercise afterwards, and there were three additional instances of undefined forms of ill health."

p 167 "In not a single instance have I met with a word about the growing dissimilarity being due to the action of the firm free will of one or both of the twins, which had triumphed over natural tendencies; and yet a large proportion of my correspondents happen to be clergymen, whose bent of mind is opposed, as I feel assured from the tone of their letters, to a necessitarian view of life."

p 168 ".. in those cases where there is a growing diversity and where no external cause can be assigned either by the twins themselves or by their family for it, we may feel sure that is must be chiefly or altogether due to a want of thorough similarity in their nature."

p 169 "The steady and pitiless march of the hidden weaknesses in our constitutions, through illness to death, is painfully revealed by the histories of twins. We are too apt to look upon illness and death as capricious events, and there are some who ascribe them to the direct effect of supernatural interference, whereas the fact of the maladies of two twins being continually alike shows that illness and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of constitutional changes beginning at birth, and upon which external circumstances have, on the whole, very small effect."

Evolutionary Psychology, Symmetry and Composite Portraits
"(1) I collected photographic portraits of different persons .... (2) I reduced their portraits photographically to the same size ... (3) I superimposed portraits like the successive leaves of a book ... (4) I fastened the book against the wall in such a way that I could turn over the pages in succession ... (5) I focused my camera on the book ... (6) I began photographing, taking one page after the other in succession without moving the camera ... p. 6

"The effect of composite portraiture is to bring into evidence all the traits in which there is agreement, and to leave but a ghost of a trace of individual peculiarities. There are so many traits in common in all faces that the composite picture when made from many components is far from being a blur; it has altogether the look of an ideal composition." p. 7

Stu Kauffman and some of Howard Bloom:
Kauffman talks a lot about complex organizations and the evolution of cooperative and non cooperative nets. A key idea is that more interconnections between decision units slow any decisions that are made by the network. Isolation by a unit means independent, more variable behavior for that unit; having 3 or more interconnections effectively stabilizes it.

p 47 ... the great teachers of all creeds have made seclusion a prominent religious exercise. In short, by enforcing celibacy, fasting, and solitude, they have done their best towards making men mad, and they have always largely succeeded in inducing morbid conditions among their followers

The vast majority of persons of our race have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone; they exalt the vox populi, even when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the vox Dei, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority, and custom. ... I shall endeavor to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature ...

p 52 "to live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked. The protective senses of each individual who chooses to live in companionship are multiplied by a large factor, and he thereby receives a maximum of security at a minimum cost of restlessness. (Definitely Bloom's ancestor here!)

p 55-56 "A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organisation."

p 194 "There is nothing as yet observed in the order of events to make us doubt that the universe is bound together in space and time, as a single entity. ...
p 195 "Life in general may be looked upon as a republic where the individuals re for the most part unconscious that while they are working for themselves they are also working for the public good."
p 196 "We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed. we only know that the cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and others growing to supply their places, and that the continual sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the larger and conscious life of the man as a whole. Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind."

197 An incalculable amount of lower life has been certainly passed through before that human organisation was attained, of which we and our generation are for the time the holders and transmitters. This is no mean heritage, and I think it should be considered as a sacred trust, for, together with man, intelligence of a sufficiently high order to produce great results appears, so far as we can infer from the varied records of the prehistoric past, to have first dawned upon the tenantry of the earth. Man has already shown his large power in the modifications he has made on the surface of the globe, and in the distribution of plants and animals. He has cleared such vast regions of forest that his work that way in North America alone, during the past half century, would be visable to an observer as far off as the moon. He has dug and drained; he has exterminated plants and animals that were mischievous to him; he has domesticated those that serve his purpose, and transplanted them to great distances from their native places. Now that this new animal man, finds himself somehow in existence, endowed with a little power and intelligence, he ought, I submit, to awake to a fuller knowledge of his relatively great position, and begin to assume a deliberate part in furthering the great work of evolution. He may infer the course it is about to pursue, and from his observation of that which it has already followed, and he might devote his modicum of power, intelligence, and kindly feeling to render its future progress less slow and painful. Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half unconsciously, and for his own personal advantages, but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is religious duty to do so deliberately and systematically" (Remember that he and Ed have a similar concept of religion.)

Finally, David Haig, Gazzaniga, and Edelman:
p 217 "Another inquiry into visions showed that, however ill explained they may still be, they belong for the most part, if not altogether, to an order of phenomena which no one dreams in other cases of calling supernatural. Many investigations concur in showing the vast multiplicity of mental operations that are in simultaneous action, of which only a minute part falls within the ken of consciousness, and suggest that much of what passes for supernatural is due to one portion of our mind being contemplated by another portion of it, as if it had been in that of another person. The term 'individuality' is in fact a most misleading word."

This last one calls not only Kauffman to mind but also Kay Jamison. Plomin and others also refer to these ideas in Behavioral Genetics, under the concept of "emergenesis"
p 127 The hallucinations of great men may be accounted for in part by their sharing a tendency which we have seen to be not uncommon in the human race, and which, if it happens to be natural to them, is liable to be developed in their over-wrought brains by the isolation of their lives... great many may even be indebted to touches of madness for their greatness; the ideas by which they are haunted, and to whose pursuit they devote themselves, and by which they rise to eminence, having much in common with the monomania of insanity."

p 147 "Extreme fluency and a vivid and rapid imagination are gifts naturally and healthfully possessed by those who rise to be great orators or literary men, for they could not have become successful in those careers without it. The curious fact already alluded to of five editors of newspapers being know to me as having phantasmagoria, points to a connection between two forms of fluency, the literary and the visual. Fluency may be also a morbid faculty, being markedly increased by alcohol (as poets are never tired of telling us), and by various drugs; and it exists in delirium, insanity, and states of high emotions. The fluency of a vulgar scold is extraordinary.

Genotype-environment interaction?:
p 128 "Different aspects of the multifarious character of man respond to different calls from without, so that the same individual, and, much more, the same race, may behave very differently at different epochs. ... The same nation may be seized by a military fervour at one period, and by a commercial one at another; they may be humbly submissive to a monarch, or become outrageous republicans. The love of art, gaiety, adventure, science, religion may be severally paramount at different times."

Nesse on mismatch, Wilson on natural religion:
p 152 "Conscience is now know to be partly transmitted by inheritance in the way and under the conditions clearly explained by Mr. Darwin, and partly to be an unsuspected result of early education. ... The doctrine of evolution shows that no race can be in perfect harmony with its surroundings; the latter are continually changing, while the organism of the race hobbles after, vainly trying to overtake them. Therefore the inherited part of conscience cannot be an infallible guide, and the acquired part of it may, under the influence of dogma, be a very bad one. The history of fanaticism shows too clearly that this is not only a theory but a fact. Happy the child, especially in the inquiring days, who has been taught a religion that mainly rests of the moral obligations between man and man in domestic and national life, and which, so far as it is necessarily dogmatic, rests chiefly upon the proper interpretation of facts about which there is no dispute, --- namely, on those habitual occurrences which are always open to observation, and which form the basis of so-called natural religion."

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