Francis Galton pioneered scientific advances in many fields '“ but also founded the racist pseudoscience of eugenics

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Richard Gunderman, Indiana University (THE CONVERSATION) A popular pseudoscience was leaving its mark on American culture a century ago in everything from massive reductions in quotas for immigration to the U.S., to thousands of ‘œfitter family’� contests at county fairs, to a growing acceptance of birth control by those who thought it could curtail the fertility of ‘œundesirables.’� These are just a few examples of the influence of eugenics in the early 20th century. The idea of scientist Francis Galton, eugenics suggested that negative traits could be bred out of the human species by discouraging reproduction by those considered inferior. It laid the groundwork for forced sterilization laws in the U.S. and Nazi ‘œracial hygiene’� programs and the Holocaust. While Galton is primarily remembered today, 110 years after his death, as the father of the shameful pseudoscience of eugenics, during his life he was considered one of the most influential thinkers of his day. He made seminal contributions in fields as diverse as statistics, geology, meteorology, anthropology, psychology, biology and psychometrics. My interest in Galton was renewed through my university’s decision to remove from buildings the name of one of its past presidents ‘” David Starr Jordan ‘” who also happened to be a eugenicist. Scientific contributions Galton was a pioneer in meteorology, the study of weather. His 1863 book ‘œMeteorographica’� was the first to describe weather on a continental scale. He developed instruments for measuring different weather parameters, described the use of barometric pressure in weather prediction, and devised systems for recording weather information. He published the world’s first weather map in a newspaper, showing the reported weather in England on March 31, 1875. Galton was an innovator in the field of statistics, the first to recognize the ‘œwisdom of the crowd.’� He once attended a livestock fair where villagers were asked to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated. When Galton looked at their estimates, he found that while almost all the guesses were wrong, both the middle guess and the average of the guesses were almost exactly correct. From such observations he helped to develop the concepts of mean and variation, leading him to formulate the essential statistical concept of standard deviation. Galton helped forge a new science of forensics. Fortune tellers and others had long scrutinized the lines and creases on the palms and fingers, which had been described in general terms by scientists and physicians. But Galton was the first to suggest that they could be the basis for a new science that he called dermatoglyphics ‘” or ‘œskin carvings.’� Galton demonstrated that fingerprints are unique, stable over a lifetime, and could be classified and used to identify individuals who had left prints at the scene of a crime. Scotland Yard adopted his system. Galton used scientific inquiry to investigate what proponents of religion had long preached was the power of prayer. Reasoning that if prayer works, it should be possible to measure its effects, Galton set out to discover ‘œwhether those who pray attain their objects more frequently than those who do not.’� In 1872, he published ‘œStatistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer,’� in which he found that prayer produces no measurable difference in outcomes. This conclusion is supported, he argued, by the fact that insurance companies take no interest when setting their rates in whether their clients pray or not. Classifying and enhancing human beings