2/16/02 Happy Birthday, Frank: A Life of Sir Francis Galton

Gillham, Nicholas W. (2001) A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. NY: Oxford. 23 chapters in 416 pages. Magnificent index and bibliography.

Galton's own biography placed as much importance on his African travels as on his later career in the social sciences and Gillham respected Galton's preference, devoting 33% of A Life to Galton's African travels. (Frank nearly drowned three times in one escapade or another!). Like other roving Victorians, Galton wrote home and built his audience while in foreign lands. His first book was The Art of Travel; Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, a guide for travelers who might share quarters with snakes and big cats. Galton eventually showed us more civilized tools such as questionnaires, percentiles, regression, regression to the mean, correlation, biometrics, composite photos, and fingerprints...equipping us for voyages across human nature. He also put a brick or two under psychometrics and studies of mental imagery and unconscious mental processes, and eventually endowed a eugenics chair at University College, London, where Pearson, R. A. Fisher, and JBS Haldane followed his path.

Charles Robert Darwin and Galton sometimes had PushMe-PullYou scientific contests. One involved whether inheritance factors are found in the blood. Galton killed a few generations of rabbits but eventually swapped blood between fertile does and proved Darwin's hypothesis about gemmules to be wrong. Galton also won one in regard to the zygosity of identical twins. Galton offered the original distinction between heredity and environment but, unlike Darwin, was more fascinated by heredity:

Unfortunately, Galton is still misquoted today. According to Galton:

"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." (Inquiries, p. 172)

Even behavior geneticists use this quote but omit the second half of the first sentence and chide Galton for being obviously wrong. Thus, even Galton had his problems with the standard social science model whose persistence suggests that we may be arguing with an adaptation when we face mothers and professors who endorse it.

Galton also anticipated our modern, nascent understanding of the importance of prenatal conditions for individual development, conditions that we now know to include not only our mother's chemistry and infections but also her crooning and the sharp barks from some of our fathers:

"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." Ironically, by changing time scales from eons to a few human generations, Galton made Darwin's environment a form of "nurture" and looked instead for "nature" in the enduring traits that emerge within families. (Inquiries, p. 131)

Darwin and Galton shared Erasmus Darwin as grandfather but had different grandmothers: Charles Darwin by way of Mary Howard and Francis Galton through Elizabeth Pole. Charles was more reclusive and sometimes manipulative in how he built alliances. Francis appeared to be more openly sociable, discovered his passion for individual differences, and hounded those differences to their probable origins just as he did when exploring the Nile. The contrast in temper between these two men surely is a reflection of that to be found in Mary who died at 30 and in Elizabeth...robust, determined, and lively.

Thus, Galton and Darwin may have helped to define each other according to scripts written in part by their grandmothers. Galton himself remarked on the lack of information about the mothers of eminent men when he wrote: "It is, of course, a grief to me, in writing this book, that circumstances make it impossible to estimate the influence of the individual peculiarities of the mother --- for good or for bad --- upon her offspring. They appear to me, for the reasons stated, to be as important elements in the inquiry as those of the father, and yet I am obliged to completely ignore them in a large majority of instances, on account of the lack of reliable information." (Hereditary Genius, p. 104).

Could it be that we males are often a display for our wives but of our mothers? Could it be that mothers play a subtle hand through a card represented by each child, becoming known largely through children's deeds and with less personal risk?

Gillham gives a magnificent play-by-play of the biometric-Mendelian debates of the 1890s, more exciting than most Superbowls. Damn, those guys played rough and sometimes used Nature as a lethal conduit for mud, sneers, and sniping.

Galton was used by Karl Pearson and by William Bateson but in opposite ways, one to advance Pearson's continuous models of trait distribution and the other Bateson's concept of particulate inheritance. The journal, Biometrika, arose from this battle. It is possible that Pearson wanted to be credited as Galton's heir for saving humanity. Bateson was equally determined but for a different cause, perhaps to save biology from Platonists and mathematicians like Pearson. Bateson gathered thousands of shells in Central Asia and was determined to beat Pearson in the problems of species discontinuity, variations in stable traits within one generation but regression to the mean across several of them, and saltatory jumps in evolution. Bateson used Mendel and Galton in the same manner that Pearson used Darwin and Galton...as sword and shield, keys to a personal legacy. (By Eiseley's account, Darwin himself once believed in saltatory evolutionary changes but was talked out of it.)

Gillham chisels profiles of Henry Morgan Stanley, William Whewell (who gave us the word "science" and of whom Darwin remarked, "I understand that he has read the introduction to a great many books," Gregor Mendel (ignored by both Darwin and by Galton), Karl Pearson (born Carl but captivated by Germanic traditions and, according to Medawar's speculation, changed his name in order to honor Marx), Robert FitzRoy, Alfred Russel Wallace, WK Brooks, and WFR Weldon.

Gillham gave us plenty of incidentals from Galton such as the verity that London women are more beautiful that those of Aberdeen. Also, an average bloke fidgeted twice a minute in an auditorium seat but fidgeted five times as often when thoroughly bored. (Galton kept track of these things by a pin and paper counter that he carried in each pocket...he counted so much that he might have been considered in the modern age to have a little Aspergers as is true for many scientists today. He even counted the number of thoughts that he had during a walk and found both the frequency and content of his thoughts correlated strongly with the route he took.) Galton showed us another way to get data: hold a lek, a contest at a fair. Galton and friends filled a segment with tests of strength, size, and agility and people had to buy a ticket to challenge each other while Galton stacked up the data. (David Buss, are you paying attention?) Gillham also mentions Galton's use at Cambridge of a "gumption reviver," a bucket of water that dripped water on his head while he studied through the night, the bucket refilled every 15 minutes by another student.

Allen's review in Nature described Galton's personal life as "banal" after he got married. Galton, however, showed a pattern similar to that of hyperactive rhesus males in the wild and hyperactive men and women in my home town. They are marvelously anchored by a parent or spouse...remove the anchor through death, separation, or divorce and the brassy one drops weight, loses sleep, and comes to counseling until they get another anchor or until the old one lets them back in the door. Along these lines, Galton appears to have been erratic for about 6 years after his father's death and settled remarkably about the time that he met and wed Louisa Butler. She was with him for 45 years. He was anchored a second time after her death by his young niece, Eva Biggs, who traveled widely with him and a family servant. Like many of us he orbited far but kept home nearby.

Galton studied identical twins and recognized traits that run through several generations of any given family:

"The world is beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His vigour, his character, and his diseases are principally derived from theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities; but more frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one or another of them showing now here and now there. The life-histories of our relatives are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more instructive to us than those of strangers, far more fitted to encourage and to forewarn us. If there be such a thing as a natural birthright, I can conceive of none superior to the right of the child to be informed, at first by proxy through his guardian, and afterwards personally, of the life-history, medical and other, of his ancestry." (Inquiries, p. 30)

We all have such traits that are ignored so that they will not be misused by school personnel, the courts, or our Sunday School teachers. Still, I find meaning and hope that we will find a careful way to use Galton's outlook.

Galton also wanted to improve the collective human condition :

"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 but ruined it:

"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." (Inquiries, p. 2)

Eagh!

Galton may never have questioned why it was that social excellence was (and still is) associated with lowered reproductive success. Arthur Balfour, a former prime minister and not a geneticist, noted at the first Eugenics Conference in 1910 that if the upper classes are superior, why aren't they producing babies? He further cautioned that "'every faddist' would seize 'hold of the eugenic problem as a machinery for furthering his own particular method of bringing the millennium upon the earth." (Gillham, p. 346)

Gillham notes that the English were more restrained in their zeal for eugenics than was true in the United States, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia. Gillham complement Matt Ridley's story that socialists and an attitude of enforced cooperation, "we will make you do what is best for the rest of us and punish anyone who doesn't agree," were the forces behind eugenics. The wave of sterilization, separation, and racial hostility was breakwatered in the U.K. by libertarians, including Josiah Wedgwood who filibustered a crucial session in Parliament.

Unfortunately, there are still faddists on either side who ape de Waal's chimps, reciting old arguments because the rest of their group does so. Even though the niche has changed we will find reverberations of these issues again and again as we unfold one set of ideas or another. The many of us who want to save the rest of us will again decide what traits are the useful ones and discover facile answers to difficult questions. For example, when short of medicines or food, do we give first to the weakest or to the least impaired? How to balance the short term benefits and probable long term costs of those medicines or the reverse scene, that of short term costs and glimmering illusions of long term gains from imposing our religions?

And how do we compensate for niche changes in a way that surpasses what nature has done for 360 million years through sexual selection and through the eugenics practices of teenage girls and mothers who weed out the selfish, bizarre, and impulsive from each generation's crop of human males, countering erosion in social skills and reciprocity with an up close and personal focus that is more selective than any government social program and more sensitive to the dynamic features of a particular setting?

In the January 3rd issue of Nature Garland Allen gave high marks to Gillham's work. David J. Galton remarked in JAMA that "It requires something of a polymath to understand, let alone write about, all the complex issues, and Professor Gillham rises to the challenge superbly." Thus, A Life has substantial credibility but Galton wrote well and eloquently on his own behalf. Read his originals if you can find them. (As Galton noticed, used copies of his first edition of Inquiries in Human Faculty were already expensive and difficult to find in 1911! The going rate for Pearson's 4-volume Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton is now between $900-$1200.)

Loren Eiseley observed, "With occasional struggling exceptions such as Wallace, it was the amateur who laid the foundations of the science of today. The whole philosophy of modern biology was established by such a 'dabbler' as Charles Darwin, who never at any time held a professional position in the field. Charles Lyell and his great precursor, the Scotsman James Hutton, similarly laid the foundations of modern geology without claiming much in the way of formal institutional connections." Francis Galton could eventually be recognized as clearly in the main course to our modern beliefs and the greatest of Erasmus's grandsons.

Happy Birthday, Frank...

James Brody, Ph.D.
www.behavior.net/forums/evolutionary

References:

de Beer, G. (1983) (Ed.) Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley: Autobiographies. NY: Oxford
De Waal, F. (2001) "The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist," NY: Basic Books.
Eiseley, L. (1979) Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists. New York: Harcourt.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 2002 Edition.
Galton, Francis. (1907/1911) Inquiries into Human Faculty. Dutton: NY.
Galton, Francis. (1892/1972) Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Galton, Francis. (1892/1972) Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
King-Hele, Desmond (1999) Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequaled Achievement. London, UK: Giles de la Mare.
Ridley, M. (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. NY: Harper Collins.

Thanks to Ian Pitchford and his evolutionary psychology list serve for the continued stream of material about human genetics.

Copyright, James Brody, 2002, all rights reserved.

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