Description
Book SynopsisFew scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as Francis Galton. He was an important African explorer, travel writer, and geographer. He was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. Now, Nicholas Gillham paints an engaging portrait of this Victorian polymath. The book traces Galton''s ancestry (he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and the cousin of Charles Darwin), upbringing, training as a medical apprentice, and experience as a Cambridge undergraduate. It recounts in colorful detail Galton''s adventures as leader of his own expedition in Namibia. Darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in Galton''s life was the publication of the Origin of Species. Thereafter, Galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis
Trade ReviewA splendidly readable and informative guide to Galton's life, works and impact ... the accounts of Galton's investigations of heredity and their reception make the book so useful and so absorbing ... succeeds remarkably well at communicating the shape and content of Galton's work on the physiology and populational dynamics of inheritance ... it will be the biography for a long time to come. * Heredity *
