Name: Francis Galton

Born: February 16, 1822 Haslemere, Surrey, England

Died: January 17, 1911 at age of 88
Place of death: Haslemere, United Kingdom
Cause of death: Tuberculosis
Residence: England
Nationality: British
Alma mater: King’s College, London Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for: Eugenics, The Galton board, Regression toward the mean, Standard
deviation,

EUGENICS
Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the
human race. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these
goals. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar and cousin of Charles
Darwin, first used the term eugenics, meaning “well-born.” Galton believed that the
human race could help direct its future by selectively breeding individuals who have
“desired” traits. This idea was based on Galton’s study of upper class Britain. Following
these studies, Galton concluded that an elite position in society was due to a good
genetic makeup. While Galton’s plans to improve the human race through selective
breeding never came to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister turns in other
countries.

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 BEAN MACHINE
The bean machine, also known as the Galton Board or quincunx, is a device
invented by Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the central limit theorem, in particular that
the normal distribution is approximate to the binomial distribution. Among its
applications, it afforded insight into regression to the mean or "regression to mediocrity".
The Galton Board consists of a vertical board with interleaved rows of pegs. Beads are
dropped from the top, and when the device is level, bounce either left or right as they hit
the pegs. Eventually, they are collected into bins at the bottom, where the height of
bead columns accumulated in the bins will eventually approximate a bell curve.
Overlaying Pascal's triangle onto the pins shows the number of different paths that can
be taken to get to each bin.

REGRESSION TOWARD THE MEAN

The above figure is a replication of this plot, where the blue circles represent the height
of each child plotted against the mean height of their two parents (which Galton
described as the ‘mid-parent height’). Galton grouped the results by intervals of 1
inch, which means that many points are plotted on top of one another. Using Stephen
Senn’s approach in his Significance article about Galton, each point has been moved
a very small amount in both directions to separate the overlapping points from one
another so that it’s easier to visualise where there are many observations plotted at
the same point. When Galton examined this plot he discovered a surprising result. If
a child’s height was on average the same as their parents, he would expect the data
to follow the black line in the figure above. However, plotting the line of best fit through
the data (red dashed line), he found that the data did not follow this black line and that
the slope of the least squares fit was in fact less steep.

Prepared by:
Glazy Kim D. Seco
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