Francis Galton

Born in 1822, Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's half-cousin and a Victorian polymath who turned statistical methods toward everything from prayer's efficacy (he found none) to the optimal brewing of tea. His 1869 book Hereditary Genius launched the first systematic attempt to study inherited intelligence, and over the next four decades he produced more than 340 papers and books while founding psychometrics, differential psychology, and scientific meteorology. He developed the concept of correlation, promoted regression toward the mean, pioneered the use of questionnaires for collecting data on human communities, and devised fingerprint classification methods still used in forensic science. He also originated eugenics during the Victorian era - coining the term in 1883 - and his ideas on selective breeding and biological hierarchy became the basis of behavioural genetics and later drew significant criticism as social Darwinism and biological racism. Knighted in 1909, he died two years later, leaving a legacy split between statistical innovation and a doctrine of human improvement that hardened into something darker.