Danielle - Biography

Francis Galton: Short biography of his last years

Francis Galton was a member of the Royal Society family and since his youth he was considered a prodigy child. In his family there were many scientists, among them Charles Darwin, who was his cousin.

Galton was a scientist of the XIX century that wrote more than 340 paper and several books. His studies were relevant for several scientific areas, such as meteorology, geography and statistic. However he devoted the last years of his life to eugeny, which contributed to the knowledge of human genetic years later.

Eugeny was one of the first studies that allowed to understand the physical and intellectual variability of human species. That theory is connected with the heredity, because the human features are shared by related, mainly parents and children and siblings. Heredity is essential for genetics fundaments.

In spite of the areas that Galton worked, the eugeny was really relevant for Genetics, which is based in the phenotype and genotype association. Therefore, knowing the variability of human characteristics, as described by Galton, could induce the geneticist to study the chromosomal variability. Then Galton was and is very important to science.

I chose to write about Galton because he was a great scientist and brought important contributions to genetics, making evident the biological variability. Genetic has allowed us to identify the cause of different diseases as well as several species that were morphologically classified as one unique species previously.