The problem of practical eugenics

by Karl Pearson

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56 pages, Paperback

Published July 4, 2015

About the author

Karl Pearson FRS (/ˈpɪərsɨn/) (27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) (originally named Carl) was an influential English mathematician who has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.

In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.

A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.

When the 23 year-old Albert Einstein started a study group, the Olympia Academy, with his two younger friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, he suggested that the first book to be read was Pearson's The Grammar of Science. This book covered several themes that were later to become part of the theories of Einstein and other scientists. Pearson asserted that the laws of nature are relative to the perceptive ability of the observer. Irreversibility of natural processes, he claimed, is a purely relative conception. An observer who travels at the exact velocity of light would see an eternal now, or an absence of motion. He speculated that an observer who traveled faster than light would see time reversal, similar to a cinema film being run backwards. Pearson also discussed antimatter, the fourth dimension, and wrinkles in time.

Pearson's relativity was based on idealism, in the sense of ideas or pictures in a mind. He stated, "...science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind..." "In truth, the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world." (Ibid., Ch. II, § 6) "Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man." (Ibid., Ch. III, § 4)

Pearson achieved widespread recognition across a range of disciplines and his membership of, and awards from, various professional bodies reflects this:

1896: elected FRS: Fellow of the Royal Society
1898: awarded the Darwin Medal
1911: awarded the honorary degree of LLD from the University of St Andrews
1911: awarded a DSc from University of London
1920: offered (and refused) the OBE
1932: awarded the Rudolf Virchow medal by the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft
1935: offered (and refused) a knighthood

He was also elected an Honorary Fellow of King's College Cambridge, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, University College London and the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Member of the Actuaries' Club.

Pearson's work was all-embracing in the wide application and development of mathematical statistics, and encompassed the fields of biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine, psychology and social history. In 1901, with Walter Frank Raphael Weldon and Francis Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika whose object was the development of statistical theory. He edited this journal until his death. Among those who assisted Pearson in his research were a number of female mathematicians who included Beatrice Mabel Cave-Browne-Cave and Frances Cave-Browne-Cave. He also founded the journal Annals of Eugenics (now Annals of Human Genetics) in 1925. He published the Drapers' Company Research Memoirs largely to provide a record of the output of the Department of Applied Statistics not published elsewhere.

Pearson's thinking underpins many of the 'classical' statistical methods which are in common use today.