Astral Codex Ten

Francis Galton

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Francis Galton

Article

Francis Galton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between November 09, 2021 and May 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Charles’ cousin Francis Galton invented the modern fields of psychometrics, meteorology, eugenics, and statistics”; “Darwin family member Francis Galton, inventor of eugenics”; “Memories Of My Life is Francis Galton’s autobiography”. It most often appears alongside Adam Mastroianni, Memories Of My Life, Resident Contrarian.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: November 09, 2021
  • Last seen: May 15, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
Charles Darwin discovered the theory of evolution. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin also groped towards some kind of proto-evolutionary theory, made contributions in botany and pathology, and founded the influential Lunar Society of scientists. His other grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was a pottery tycoon who "pioneered direct mail, money back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogues" and became "one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the 18th century". Charles' cousin Francis Galton invented the modern fields of psychometrics, meteorology, eugenics, and statistics (including standard deviation, correlation, and regression). Charles' son Sir George Darwin, an astronomer, became president of the Royal Astronomical Society and another Royal Society fellow. Charles' other son Leonard Darwin, became a major in the army, a Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Geography Society, and a mentor and patron to Ronald Fisher, another pioneer of modern statistics. Charles' grandson Charles Galton Darwin invented the Darwin-Fowler method in statistics, the Darwin Curve in diffraction physics, Darwin drift in fluid dynamics, and was the director of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (and vaguely involved in the Manhattan Project).
Inline links: Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Francis Galton, Sir George Darwin, Leonard Darwin, Charles Galton Darwin
Darwin family member Francis Galton, inventor of eugenics, who presumably felt very conflicted about all this cousin-marrying When the Darwins weren’t marrying each other, they were marrying others of their same intellectual caliber. There is at least one Darwin-Huxley marriage: that would be George Pember Darwin (a computer scientist, Charles’ great-grandson) and Angela Huxley (Thomas’ great-granddaughter) in 1964. But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ granddaughter) married Geoffrey Keynes (John Maynard Keynes’ brother, and himself no slacker - he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain). And John Maynard and Geoffrey’s sister, Margaret Keynes, married Archibald Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And let’s not forget Marie Curie’s daughter marrying a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
More comments: I really enjoyed Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom and From Paralysis To Fatigue, but I couldn’t justify having two books on Chinese history or chronic fatigue in the finalists, so I had to demote them to Honorable Mentions. Memories Of My Life is Francis Galton’s autobiography; read it if you want to learn about things like how:
Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
November 11, 2022 · Original source
Francis Galton did a bunch of research on visual imagination, ie the ability to picture something in your “mind’s eye”. He found that this ranged from people who didn’t have this at all, to people with “eidetic imagery”, eg exactly as vivid as the real world - and psychologists have since confirmed this through various clever experiments. He also found that the people who didn’t have visual imagination at all thought that all the references to “seeing things in your mind’s eye” in the language and culture were just kind of metaphorical, and nobody could actually do that. When he tried to convince them that lots of people could, they were skeptical! They didn’t believe that other people could be having this weird internal experience which was impossible for them. I think this was wrong (I have some visual imagination). This made me more amenable to claims that some people can have mental experiences that others can’t, and that denying a mental experience claimed by thousands of very trustworthy-seeming people is fraught.
Inline links: did a bunch of research on visual imagination
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
Inline links: has a great review of
Adraste: - against this kind of thing. Which brings me back to my objection to your seemingly-compassionate-and-sensible eugenics proposal. Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way3. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned. People roll their eyes at slippery slopes, but some slopes are genuinely slippery, and the slope from “thinks about eugenics at all” to “involuntary sterilization campaign” seems steep enough that I would just rather people not think about eugenics at all.
Inline links: 3
Francis Galton had the good fortune to die before people started misusing his ideas, allowing us to hope he would have opposed such developments. Ehrlich is still very much alive. When asked in 2015 if he still agreed with everything in his book, he said that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Inline links: he said that