----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: Galton
How Galton got the data is very interesting. No professor today
would do what he did to get his data.
Good heavens! What did he do? You're not going to leave it at that,
are you?
..............................................
Francis Galton was one of the better known scientists in the later part
of the 19th century. You can find out about him by doing a web inquiry. GOOGLE
got me over 2000.
I am referring to his book "Natural Inheritance", published in 1889, and
based on work from about 1884. Galton was a man of the times, and did not have
the powerful stat tools we now have, or the insights into measurements on
humans that we now have.
1. He states "I have long been engages upon certain problems that lie at
the base of the science of heredity.... This volume contains the more
important of the results, set forth in an orderly way, with more completeness
than has hitherto been possible, together with a large amount of new
matter"
2. He states "..but what meaning can we attach to the word
'Average" when it is applied to the stature of two such different beings as
the Father and Mother?...A serious complexity due to sexual differences seems
to await us at every step when investigating the problems of heredity.
Fortunately we are able to evade it altogether by using an artifice at the
outset...The artifice is never deal with female measures as they are observed,
but always to employ their male equivalents in place of them.....". On page
42, he states " We learn how to transmute female measures of any
characteristic into male ones, by comparing their respective schemes, and
devising a formula that will change the one to the other. In the case of
stature, the simple multiple of 1.08 was found to do this with sufficient
precision." You would not find this in any current paper by a statistician in
2000.
3. On page 16 he states, "Fortunately for us, our ignorance of the
subject will not introduce any special difficulty in the inquiry on which we
are now engaged." (he is referring to how acquired faculties can be inherited
by the children here.) Would any statistician today make such a statement in a
paper for publication or a thesis?
4. He states on page 71, "I had to collect all of my data for myself as
nothing existed, so far as I know, that would not satisfy even my primary
requirement". What he did was to make up a notice (published in the
newspapers) "Mr. Francis Galton offers 500(l) in prizes to those
subjects...who shall furnish him before May 15, 1884, with the best extracts
from their own family records". He did this, paying the prizes out of his own
pocket, and publishing the names and addresses of the people who were awarded
prizes. I am sure you wouldn't find a statistician today who would do
this out his own pocket, or publish the names and addresses of the
responders.
5. Lastly, he drew conclusions about his regression on the effect of
stature of parents to their children, without making any statistical tests.
(In fairness, the concept of hypothesis and statistical test were unknown at
this time). He does however say that the data was "too scattered and irregular
to make it useful to give the results in detail"
6. Of interest, Galton explores inheritance aspects of disease. The
primary cause of death was consumption (16%). However the conversion of
phrases describing the health or death symptoms was quite broad, and included
anything with lungs, breathing, or delicacy of health, besides straight
statements of "consumption, phthisis, tubercular disease, lung disease,
abscess on lung, etc. Nowadays we have definite tests for tuberculosis.
DAH
