Hereditary Genius

by GALTON, Sir Francis

[30 Day Return Guarantee] Price: $575.00

Book Description

London: Macmillan and Co., 1869. First American edition. vi, [2, contents and errata], 390, [2, publisher's ads] pp. With two folding tables opposite p. 376. Publisher's sand-grain green cloth with gilt spine lettering. Evidence of bookplate removal from front pastedown, small light mark on lower spine (and ends mildly worn), else a very good copy; bright, tight and clean."Galton originated the practice of empirical research in medical genetics. In Hereditary Genius, his best-known and most influential book, Galton investigated the heritability of scholarly, artistic, and athletic talent, using the records of notable families as data. He concluded that such talents have a high degree of heritability, and that people vary in the kind and degree of hereditary abilities they possess. He applied the Gaussian or normal curve to the range of human abilities, expanding upon Quetelet's observation that certain measurable human characteristics are distributed like the error function, and thus gave a new importance to biological and psychological variation, which had previously been regarded as unimportant" (Norman #864 for the UK edition).

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