October 17, 2024

·      What question about the reading for today did I prepare before class?

o   Why did he decide to focus on fingerprints?

·      What key ideas did I hear in seminar today?

o   From his early maps, he discovered the alternating patterns of high-pressure
and low-pressure systems now known to determine weather changes

o   Although Darwin had not discussed human beings in The Origin of Species, Galton quickly grasped the implication that humans must be constantly
evolving like all other species.

o   This would be expected, Galton argued, if the required natural ability for each particular field were some complex combination of physical, mental, and emotional characteristics, each one separately and partially inherited. Each offspring of an eminent parent would then inherit some proportion of the qualities for achievement in that same field, but not necessarily all of them

o   From the very beginning of his involvement with Darwinian theory, Galton had held a utopian vision, whose ultimate feasibility depended on the correctness of his hypothesis about hereditary ability. He clearly, if crudely, expressed his idea in the opening paragraph of Hereditary Genius when he declared that just as it is easy for animal breeders

o   To create a eugenic society, Galton believed it was necessary to encourage the most highly able young men and women to intermarry and have children at a greater rate than parents of lesser abilities. Ten young women would also have been tested and selected and, should these young paragons agree to marry each other, the Queen herself would give away the brides at a state wedding

o   He was one of the first serious investigators of fingerprints, for example, which he hoped would prove to have an inherited basis. He developed the method of classifying prints into “loops,” “arches,” and “whorls” that was first adopted by Scotland Yard and remains in standard use in law enforcement worldwide today

·      What substantive ideas or comments did I contribute in seminar today?

o   Active listening

·      What did I learn today that contributed to my understanding of psychology?

Galton’s tests were eventually found not to correlate with meaningful, real-life
intellectual accomplishment, and the first successful intelligence tests had to await the development of different procedures by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, based on assumptions very different from Galton’s