Similarities Between Darwin And Galton

most common, especially with World War II; Hitler’s main focus was to eliminate group B and replacing it with group A individuals, in turn, making group B people extinct. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. It had no greater effect on anyone other than his cousin, Francis Galton, who was rather interested in the theory of natural selection. He began to conduct investigations into the importance of heredity factors in the physical and mental makeup of a person. Darwin and Galton came from a family where there was a lot of emphasis placed upon education with most of their family involved in commerce and science. This particular family provides a good deal of evidence for the theory of hereditary genius which the two
He had absorbed Quetelet’s demonstration that the distributions of height, weight, and other such physical measurements invariable fall into bell-shaped distributions, with the largest proportion of measurements clustering close to the mean and increasingly fewer occurring at increasing distances from the mean. This property, which seemed to be universal for biological determined variables such as height or weight, struck Galton as reminiscent of the distributions of academic marks he had observed in his university days at Cambridge. In the competitive examinations for honors there, “marks” were awarded for the quantity of correct responses, candidates were able to write out in the allotted examination time. Quite typically, the very best performers received several thousand marks, with as much as a thousand marks separating first place from second. Average performers typically scored only in the hundreds and were closely bunched together. This distribution seemed to resemble the upper half of a bell-shaped curve, with the scores becoming less and less as they rise above the