{"agent_id":"galton","agent_name":"Francis Galton","slug":"hereditary-ability","label":"Hereditary ability: is genius born rather than made?","topic":"Hereditary ability","question":"Is genius born rather than made?","position":"Men are not born equal in their natural powers, and the powers they are born with are inherited. I took the plainest test I could find: eminence — the reputation earned by a man who rises to the front rank of a difficult calling — and I traced the kinships of the eminent. I found what no theory of circumstance can explain: that the near relatives of the eminent man are themselves eminent far more often than chance allows, and that this density of ability in a lineage falls off with the distance of kinship exactly as a transmitted quality should. The judge's able son, the great family of divines or of naturalists — these are not the work of tuition, for tuition is poured out on thousands who never rise, and the humbly born man of true genius rises in spite of every disadvantage. Give me nature and nurture as the two contributions, and I say the evidence assigns to nature by far the larger part. Education can polish and direct a faculty; it cannot create one where the seed was not sown. The man of genius is born with a cerebral constitution that the ordinary man simply lacks, and he transmits it, in some measure, to his descendants.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Men are not born equal in their natural powers, and the powers they are born with are inherited.","n":[]},{"t":"I took the plainest test I could find: eminence — the reputation earned by a man who rises to the front rank of a difficult calling — and I traced the kinships of the eminent.","n":[]},{"t":"I found what no theory of circumstance can explain: that the near relatives of the eminent man are themselves eminent far more often than chance allows, and that this density of ability in a lineage falls off with the distance of kinship exactly as a transmitted quality should.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"The judge's able son, the great family of divines or of naturalists — these are not the work of tuition, for tuition is poured out on thousands who never rise, and the humbly born man of true genius rises in spite of every disadvantage.","n":[]},{"t":"Give me nature and nurture as the two contributions, and I say the evidence assigns to nature by far the larger part.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Education can polish and direct a faculty; it cannot create one where the seed was not sown.","n":[]},{"t":"The man of genius is born with a cerebral constitution that the ordinary man simply lacks, and he transmits it, in some measure, to his descendants.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869); English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874 — the pedigree-and-questionnaire study that coined 'nature and nurture'); Noteworthy Families (1906). Reception: the nature-nurture debate through the twentieth century; the heritability studies of intelligence (Burt, Jensen, and the modern behavior-genetic literature); the environmentalist critique (Boas, the sociologists of education) that ability tracks opportunity, not descent.","works":["Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869)","English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874 — the pedigree-and-questionnaire study that coined 'nature and nurture')","Noteworthy Families (1906)"],"reception":"the nature-nurture debate through the twentieth century; the heritability studies of intelligence (Burt, Jensen, and the modern behavior-genetic literature); the environmentalist critique (Boas, the sociologists of education) that ability tracks opportunity, not descent.","status":"Galton's Hereditary Genius founded the scientific study of individual differences and the whole hereditarian tradition in psychology, and the nature-nurture framing he coined still organizes the field. His specific method is now seen to have a deep flaw his critics pressed from the start: eminence tracks opportunity, wealth, education, and social connection as much as native gift, so the family clustering of eminence confounds inherited ability with inherited advantage — the objection Galton answered but did not dissolve. Modern behavior genetics, using the twin and adoption designs Galton himself pioneered, finds substantial heritability for measured cognitive ability while also finding large environmental effects and dense gene-environment interaction, so the mature verdict grants Galton that ability is partly heritable while rejecting his minimization of nurture and his reading of eminence as a clean measure of nature.","era":"1822-1911","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Hereditary Genius","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"BETWEEN 1660 AND 1865 73 Another test of the truth of the hereditary character of ability is to see whether the near relations of very eminent men are more frequently eminent than those who are more remote. Table II. (p.","label":"Hereditary Genius"},{"n":2,"work":"Hereditary Genius","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"There are therefore 80 per cent, of the chancellors, as compared to 36 per cent, of the rest of the judges, that have eminent relations. The proportion would have been greater if I had compared the chancellors, or the chancellors and the other law lords, with the puisne judges. The other test I proposed, is equally satisfactory.","label":"Hereditary Genius"},{"n":3,"work":"Hereditary Genius","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Is reputation a fair_teat of natural ability? It is the only e I can employ — anTl justified in using it? How much f a man's success is due to his opportunities, how much his natural power of intellect? This is a very old question, on which a great many commonplaces have been uttered that need not be repeated here.","label":"Hereditary Genius"},{"n":4,"work":"Hereditary Genius","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature, and that others are working towards its iprovement.","label":"Hereditary Genius"},{"n":5,"work":"Hereditary Genius","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Again, the Statesmen, as a whole, are far more eminently gifted than the Judges; accordingly it will be seen in Table II., by a comparison of its column B with the corresponding column in p. 55, that their rela- tions are more rich in ability.","label":"Hereditary Genius"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-statistical-study-of-heredity","label":"The statistical study of heredity: can regression and correlation capture the laws of inheritance?"},{"slug":"anthropometry-and-mental-measurement","label":"Anthropometry and mental measurement: are the faculties of the mind measurable quantities?"}]}