With more deviation than is standard

After reading Adam Rutherford's book about the history of eugenics (see here for  my review ) I found myself motivated to try to understand exactly what Francis Galton (the English polymath and father of eugenics) had contributed to the development of statistics. In my review of the Rutherford book I argued that it is possible to consider someone's scientific contributions without that being any sort of endorsement of, or mitigation for, their social and political views. As we will see, Galton's work in the last quarter of the 19th century was absolutely critical in understanding and formalising the nature and strength of relationships between two variables (what we would now call the  correlation between them). This is such a fundamental aspect of measurement and data analysis in so many areas of science that its conceptual origins are worth revisiting from time to time. As I will argue in a later blog entry, some central and very useful parts of Galton's thinking on t...

This was the first book I read, very early in 2023, as part of my self-imposed, year-long challenge that I explained in an earlier blog . The page numbers I give below relate to the hardback version. As a psychologist who spent a lot of his career studying individual differences, I naturally have taken an interest in most offshoots of this broad field; including how, in some hands, interest in individual differences segued, via studying the inheritance of those differences, into a set of socio-political ideas which Francis Galton called " eugenics " (see Rutherford's  footnote, p.40, which quotes the passage where Galton's first used the term, in 1883).  Even if I hadn't had a special interest in this topic, then Rutherford's book would have been an enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking read. He writes with a fluid style that many scientists struggle to attain. He also tries to emulate J.B.S Haldane's use of the witty (and cutting) footnote, and he ...

In the last 3 months of 2021 I found myself being rather physically inactive, so I embarked on a walking challenge in 2022: I had to do a distinct walk on each day and average 5km across the 365 walks during the year. The challenge was eventually achieved, and raised a bit of money for charity. You can see some details here:- https://www.justgiving.com/page/alan-pickering-1667128827673 https://twitter.com/ad_pickering/status/1609581379750350850   Via the above links one can access the rather obsessive spreadsheet I kept, detailing each walk. I love a histogram almost as much as a spreadsheet, so here's the one for the distances achieved on the 365  walks in 2022:- After 2022, however, I got the bug for annual challenges and so I've set myself a combined reading and fishing challenge for 2023. I felt these two hobbies of mine had become a bit neglected in recent years.  The challenge is to catch 25 different species of freshwater fish in England and France, and a total of ...