FRANCIS GALTON

Just 6 years after the publication in 1859 of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, his cousin Francis Galton published two articles in Macmillan's Magazine jointly entitled “Hereditary Talent and Character.” These articles were expanded into a book published in 1869 on hereditary genius. Galton's book combined Darwin's ideas about natural selection with the work of the Belgian statistician Quetelet (1849). Galton argued that genius is a normally distributed and heritable characteristic of humans. Galton believed in racial hierarchies. He argued that the ancient Greeks were as superior to his English contemporaries in their capacity for genius as his contemporaries were superior to Africans and their American descendants.

Galton's Measurement of Simple Processes

Galton established a laboratory in the South Kensington Museum of London in 1882 for the measurement of individual differences. For a small fee, visitors to the museum were given a battery of tests designed to measure auditory and visual sensory discrimination abilities as well as reaction times to stimuli and the ability to exert hand-squeeze pressure on a dynamometer. The choice of measures was influenced by the beliefs of the British empiricist philosophers about the importance of knowledge derived from sensations as a foundation for complex cognitive functioning and by a belief held by Galton that the sensory discriminative capacities of idiots are impaired. He assumed that individuals with high intelligence would have keener discriminative capacities than individuals with low intelligence (Galton, 1883).