Interesting New Yorker review of a new book on Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and inventor of eugenics. Galton, who had a remarkably wide-ranging curiosity and intellect, did actually make significant scientific contributions, including discovering the idea that data in standard distributions are subject to "regression to mediocrity," or what we now call "regression to the mean."
But this is a pretty squirrelly concept which often lures unsuspecting passersby into "Galton's fallacy," or the mistaken belief that outliers will always regress to the mean, and therefore every field will always converge at "mediocrity." The fallacy here is that data only tend to regress to the mean; sometimes -- how often depends on how distant they are from the mean -- they will move away from it. Book author Martin Brookes accuses Galton himself of committing Galton's fallacy in royal fashion. But reviewer Jim Holt and I agree that Galton was not so far off in his understanding of statistics.
So does that mean his eugenics was actually [gasp] scientifically credible?
Well, I don't really think so. As it turns out, evolution is a pretty damn complicated, and the field of evolutionary biology still roils with different theories about how it happens. Galton believed not in Darwin's smooth, gradual evolution, but in a sudden, jerky process -- sounds a little bit like Gould's punctuated equilibrium, no? ['Punk eek,' to those in the know.] Still a very lively field of debate in evolutionary circles. The review doesn't include much on the specifics of Galton's 'understanding' of evolution, but I somehow suspect it was not all that accurate.
Moreover, at least some of this question over eugenics sort of comes down -- as you might have predicted, foresightful reader -- to the question of nature versus nurture. Turns out that Galton foresaw this as an issue; in fact, he coined the phrase, "nature versus nurture." It seems he made an honest go of proving that it was all about the nature. I suspect that the biggest problem with his program creeps in here, as them folks back in Victorian times were pretty damn unaware of the massive power of elitism, classism, and, well, nurture.
I was particularly glad to see a mention of the Israeli Air Force's training as an example of regression to the mean. This was a critical moment in the intellectual development of Daniel Kahneman, and is therefore important and good.
I had also recently come across an interesting article in the SF Chron about the history eugenics in California, always a fertile ground for ideas brilliant, wacky, and hateful.
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