Word: galton
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...coined the term eugenics, from a Greek stem meaning "good in birth," was a cousin of Charles Darwin's. Englishman Francis Galton (1822-1911) had a substantial inheritance and a Victorian range of scientific curiosity. He dabbled in a number of fields, including geographical exploration, but his passion was mathematics, particularly the infant field of statistics...
...Britain and the U.S., the great age of quantification had begun. An unforeseen consequence of industrialized democracy had been the mammoth increase in the measurement and survey of all sorts of things. Galton relished this new flood of data--"Whenever you can, count" was his motto--and eventually became absorbed in studying the mathematical distribution of what he called "natural ability" among a sample of British subjects. Galton thought natural ability could be tracked down by reading the biographical sketches of eminent Britons in handbooks and dictionaries. When he did so, he discovered that a disproportionate number of these worthies...
...fairness to Galton, he came to see the encouragement of "good" marriages as a better way to his eugenic heaven than discouraging or preventing "bad" ones. But the seed of a very dangerous notion had nevertheless been sown...
Cose covers a lot of ground, from Francis Galton's eugenics theory, which equated good English breeding with racial superiority, to contemporary social-so-called-science that has attempted to give racism a respectable face. It is no surprise that Exhibit A is Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial 1994 best seller, The Bell Curve. Cose joins the chorus of critics who rightly challenged the authors' credentials and ideological ties. "There is" for them, he says, "something comforting in the belief--even if it is rooted in fiction--that certain unfortunate realities are beyond our control, that certain unfortunate...
Gould argues convincingly that traditional interpretation of Darwin and other scholars fall short of the true significance of these heroes of early biology. Familiar images of punctuated equilibrium, evolutionary contingency and the metaphorical Galton's polyhedron that on strains the evolution are all present in sterling form lot evidence, Gould draws on his extraordinary knowledge of biology, introducing the reader to an incredible array of fascinating facts, sometimes embarrassing in their context Describing a herring's gas expulsions out an orifice next to the anus, he gleefully calls them "herring farts...