In reviewing four books about the life of Galton, Clauser (2007)¹ uses this argument to criticise one book: Galton is considered so fundamentally important and critical to the development of statistics, that many will deliberately overlook his establishment of the field of Eugenics in 1883. Defined the concept of standard deviation.
#GALTON STATISTICS HOW TO#
Re-discovered correlation and regression and discovered how to apply these in anthropology, psychology, and more.However, this is aimed at other statisticians and data scientists as I am surely not the only person who failed to consider the true origins of our field.įrancis Galton, “the founder of the field of behavioral and educational statistics”:¹ Note: This is a personal article that I wrote in order to hold my own naïvety to account. I had naïvely assumed they were a product of their time and that their research was a natural progression in the statistics behind genetics. Yet, I still viewed Pearson, Fisher, and Galton (and others) as the Fathers of Statistics who deserved to be recognised and respected for their contributions. Much of my family was murdered in the holocaust as part of a regime to eradicate a supposed “inferior race”. Until this week, it didn’t bother me that I studied the work of Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher in the Galton Lecture Theatre and Pearson Building. This week marks Holocaust Memorial Day and the end of my five years studying in the Statistics department of University College London (UCL), which was the home, for decades, of the most prominent eugenicists. A personal reckoning of my failure to acknowledge the origins of my field