The first person to propose eugenics was Francis Galton.

Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 - January 17, 1911), British scientist and explorer. He went on an expedition to South-West Africa and became famous for his achievements and was elected as a member of the Royal Geographical Society. Three years later, he was elected to the Royal Society and was knighted in his later years. His academic research interests are broad, including anthropology, geography, mathematics, mechanics, meteorology, psychology, statistics, etc. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin and was deeply influenced by his evolutionary ideas, which he introduced into the study of humans. He focused on the study of individual differences, studied the causes of individual differences from a genetic perspective, and created eugenics. His research on human faculties opened up new avenues in individual psychology and psychological testing research.

Personal introduction

Childhood

On February 16, 1822, Galton was born in Birmingham. Grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a poet, doctor, and evolution theorist. His father, Samuel Detius Galton, was a banker. Darwin's mother and Darwin's father are half-brothers and sisters. He was the youngest of seven children. His third sister, Adele, was Galton's first teacher.

He has been very smart since he was a child. He can recognize all uppercase letters after 12 months of birth, and can distinguish both uppercase and lowercase letters after 18 months. By the time he was about two and a half years old, Galton was reading children's books such as "The Spider's Web." When he was 3 years old, he learned to sign, when he was 4 years old, he could write poetry, when he was 5 years old, he could recite and understand the Scottish narrative poem "Marmion", and when he was 6 years old, he was already proficient in Homer's "Iliad" and "Iliad". "The Odyssey", 7-year-olds can appreciate Shakespeare's masterpieces, become interested in natural history, and classify insects and mineral specimens according to their own methods.

School Era

When he was 8 years old, he was sent to a boarding school to receive formal education. His behavior suddenly turned bad. He often fought with his classmates and was frequently punished by the school. At the age of 14, he entered secondary school at King Edward's School in Birmingham. When he was 15 years old, his father wanted him to study medicine, so he arranged for him to go on a medical tour to the European continent with a British medical institution. After returning, he worked as a trainee physician in internal medicine at Birmingham City Hospital for two years. This experience enabled him to accumulate a lot of knowledge. Knowledge of anatomy and physiology. In 1839, 17-year-old Galton came to King's College London to study medicine, physiology, botany and chemistry, and achieved excellent results. But soon, his interest shifted to mathematics and natural philosophy, so in 1840 he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge University, hoping to learn more mathematical knowledge. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University in 1844, he continued to study medicine, but soon after his father died of illness, he gave up his studies.

Travel and Adventure

After his father's death, Galton inherited a huge inheritance and became very wealthy, so he could do some things that interested him. Influenced by the British adventurous spirit at that time, he became interested in travel and adventure. Starting in 1845, he first went to the Nile River Basin with his friends for inspection, and then entered the hinterland of Palestine alone. Every summer, he likes to go fishing and collect seabird specimens in the Shetland Islands. Sometimes he also goes sailing or takes a hot air balloon ride. Here he discovered a large-scale clockwise rotating vortex of air and named it an anticyclone.

In 1850, after consultation with the Royal Geographical Society, Galton decided to investigate the road from western and southern Africa to Lake Ngami. The expedition was full of difficulties and dangers. In two years, he struggled against various harsh natural environments and went through hardships, gaining a large amount of first-hand information on the resources, customs and customs of Southwest Africa. His expedition report received great attention from the Royal Geographical Society, and he was elected as a member of the Society in 1853. Three years later, at the age of 34, Galton became a member of the Royal Society.

After returning from Africa, Galton suffered from depression and physical weakness, a disease that reoccurred many times in the second half of his life. From then on he no longer traveled far. In 1853 he married Louisa Butler and settled in London in 1857.

Later research

The publication of "On the Origin of Species" by Galton's cousin Darwin in 1859 aroused his interest in human inheritance.

His scientific interests soon shifted to areas related to life. He applied Darwin's principle of accidental variation around the group average to human research, opened up a new field of experimental psychology with the theme of individual differences, and published the monograph "Hereditary Genius" in 1869.

After completing the family genealogy study of intellectual talent, Galton devoted himself to establishing more precise measurement methods to examine differences in human talents. In 1883, he published a monograph, "A Study of Human Talents and Their Development," in which he outlined two epoch-making research methods and results in experimental psychology: free association and questionnaires on mental imagery. In this book, Galton also proposed for the first time a social plan that replaced natural selection with conscious human selection, for which he also coined the word "Eugenics." Therefore, people usually regard 1883 as the year when eugenics was officially born.

From 1884, Galton opened an anthropological surveying room first at the International Sanitary Exhibition and then at the South Kensington Museum. There people can measure their height, weight, grip strength and other physiological indicators. In six years, the laboratory collected detailed information on 9,337 men and women, providing a large amount of data for the study of human individual differences.

In 1888, he became interested in fingerprint research, and in 1892 he proposed a fingerprint classification method in his monograph "Fingerprintology". His fingerprint encoding method was used by Scotland Yard as a supplement to Bertrand's system of measurements to create prisoner files.

In 1904, Galton funded the establishment of a eugenics lecture at the University of London and invited Pearson to chair it. At the same time, he also established the world's first eugenics archive at the school, which was changed to a eugenics laboratory two years later. In 1908, the British Eugenics Educational Society was established, with Galton serving as its honorary president. In 1911, the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and the Biological Measurement Laboratory established by Pearson were merged into the Department of Applied Statistics.

In 1908 his memoirs "Memories of a Lifetime" were published. In 1909 he was awarded the title of Lord by the British royal family. He died in 1911 at the age of 89 at his estate in Surrey, southern England.