But, to a recent and enthusiastic convert to the scientific method, the most relevant of Galton’s many gifts was the unique contribution of three separate and distinct processes of the intellect a continuous curiosity about, and rapid apprehension of individual facts, whether common or uncommon the faculty for ingenious trains of reasoning and, more admirable than either of these, because the talent was wholly beyond my reach, the capacity for correcting and verifying his own hypotheses, by the statistical handling of masses of data, whether collected by himself or supplied by other students of the problem. Fascinating to me was Francis Galton’s all-embracing but apparently impersonal beneficence. He criticized pretensions of natural equality, insisting that ability was inherited. I can conjure up, from memory’s misty deep, that tall figure with its attitude of perfect physical and mental poise the clean-shaven face, the thin, compressed mouth with its enigmatical smile the long upper lip and firm chin, and, as if presiding over the whole personality of the man, the prominent dark eyebrows from beneath which gleamed, with penetrating humour, contemplative grey eyes. From A Life of Sir Francis Galton by Nicholas Wright Gillham. The one who stays in my mind as the ideal man of science is, not Huxley or Tyndall, Hooker or Lubbock, still less my friend, philosopher and guide Herbert Spencer, but Francis Galton, whom I used to observe and listen to-I regret to add, without the least reciprocity-with rapt attention. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of man. Whenever they are not brutalised, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who transformed statistics into a rigorous mathematical discipline used for analysis, not just in science, but in industry and politics as well. Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. The former equation reduces to Galtons ancestral law when the proportion of latent elements is 0.5, the latter when this proportion 0.6. An Average is but a solitary fact, whereas if a single other fact be added to it, an entire Normal Scheme, which nearly corresponds to the observed one, starts potentially into existence. The equation representing ancestral contributions to the heritage of the offspring differs from the multiple regression equation for predicting the value of a trait from ancestral values. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once. The Charms of Statistics.-It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views.
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