I have no patience with the hypothesis - often implied in tales meant to teach children to be good - that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the only agencies creating differences between boy and boy, or man and man, are steady application and moral effort.
Psychologists
Francis Galton
British statistician (1822-1911). Darwin's cousin, he founded individual-differences psychology, invented regression and correlation, and coined "eugenics" in 1883 - a contested statistical legacy.
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Francis Galton's Other Quotes
Whenever you can, count.
Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.
Order in apparent chaos: I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the Law of Frequency of Error.
Related Quotes
Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.
-- Edward Thorndike
Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility may rest assured that he seeks in vain.
-- Hermann von Helmholtz