Natural Inheritance

Francis Galton · 1889

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Description

Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, spent years measuring human bodies and family records to study how traits pass down. His 1889 book Natural Inheritance sums up that work with tables, charts, and family histories. Galton wanted heredity studied with numbers, not guesses.

His key find was regression to the mean: very tall parents tend to have children closer to average height. He showed the same pull toward the middle in seeds, stature, and other measured traits. That simple pattern became a base tool of statistics and of the study of inherited traits. His methods let later workers treat inheritance as a thing that could be counted.

Catalog record

CREATORFrancis Galton
YEAR1889
COLLECTIONBOOKS
FORMATTXT
FILE SIZE407 KB
VERSION1.0
LICENSEPublic Domain
RIGHTSPUBLIC DOMAIN
SOURCEInternet Archive

Source: https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.17737

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