Storytelling, statistics and hereditary thought: the narrative support of early statistics

López-Beltrán, Carlos

doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2005.12.003

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…He purported to show that eminent individuals possess a higher proportion of eminent relatives than do individuals in the population generally. Here is not the place to consider the adequacy of his evidence, a task executed by López-Beltrán (2006), Sweeney (2001), and Waller (2002). 13 Suffice it to show here that Galton presumed natural ability is a quantitative attribute, that is, one that is measurable, as opposed to one that is merely ordered or categorical.…”

Section: Galton’s Presupposition Of Mental Measurementmentioning

confidence: 94%

“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”: Sir Francis Galton and the genesis of the psychometric paradigm

Michell

2021

Theory & Psychology

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Sir Francis Galton singlehandedly instigated the navigational settings for the discipline of psychometrics by presupposing that mental attributes are measurable. In turn, this presupposition became the defining pillar of the psychometric paradigm. There were no scientifically sound reasons for adopting this presupposition and those Galton gave beg the question every time. So, what drove him to endorse this presupposition? Two considerations steered him in this direction: first, his Pythagorean philosophy of science according to which measurement is a necessary feature; and second, his desire to present eugenics as a science, which, given his Pythagorean vision, entailed that eugenics must involve measurement of relevant mental attributes. The quantitative presupposition guiding psychometrics throughout its history was, therefore, a spin-off from Galton’s marketing strategy for the pseudoscience of eugenics.

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Section: Galton’s Presupposition Of Mental Measurementmentioning

confidence: 94%

“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”: Sir Francis Galton and the genesis of the psychometric paradigm

Michell

2021

Theory & Psychology

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“…Contrary to what is generally assumed of the origin of the laws of heredity—often coupled with the experiments of Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884)—interest in studying the transmission of traits and their theoretical conceptualization began to emerge in the eighteenth century. There is a growing consensus that the concepts of biological heredity were gradually constructed from the knowledge scattered in different domains, such as philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, horticulture, and animal breeding (López-Beltrán 2006 ; Lidwell-Durnin 2020 ; McLaughlin 2007 , p. 281; Poczai and Santiago-Blay 2022 ). Thus, the formation of the epistemic space of heredity as a scientific discipline required assimilating ideas from several other disciplines.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding: Historical Background for Festetics’s Organic and Genetic Laws Four Decades Before Mendel’s Experiments in Peas

et al. 2022

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The upheavals of late eighteenth century Europe encouraged people to demand greater liberties, including the freedom to explore the natural world, individually or as part of investigative associations. The Moravian Agricultural and Natural Science Society, organized by Christian Carl André, was one such group of keen practitioners of theoretical and applied scientific disciplines. Headquartered in the “Moravian Manchester” Brünn (nowadays Brno), the centre of the textile industry, society members debated the improvement of sheep wool to fulfil the needs of the Habsburg armies fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Wool, as the raw material of soldiers' clothing, could influence the war’s outcome. During the early nineteenth century, wool united politics, economics, and science in Brno, where breeders and natural scientists investigated the possibilities of increasing wool production. They regularly discussed how “climate” or “seed” characteristics influenced wool quality and quantity. Breeders and academics put their knowledge into immediate practice to create sheep with better wool traits through consanguineous matching of animals and artificial selection. This apparent disregard for the incest taboo, however, was viewed as violating natural laws and cultural norms. The debate intensified between 1817 and 1820, when a Hungarian veteran soldier, sheep breeder, and self-taught natural scientist, Imre (Emmerich) Festetics, displayed his inbred Mimush sheep, which yielded wool extremely well suited for the fabrication of light but strong garments. Members of the Society questioned whether such “bastard sheep” would be prone to climatic degeneration, should be regarded as freaks of nature, or could be explained by natural laws. The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics’s “laws of organic functions” and “genetic laws of nature,” four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel’s seminal work on heredity in peas.

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“…In doing so, we must remind ourselves that ideas about heredity predate whole vistas of medical science, including epidemiology, immunology, endocrinology, and laboratory diagnostics. Historians of medicine studying the topic of heredity and disease have posited an early or premodern period in which stories were collected about so-called monstrous births in the naturalist tradition of 16th-century Europe (Daston & Park, 2001; López-Beltrán, 2006). Case studies of morbid haereditarii (heritable disease) recounted a range of physical/developmental forms as well as biographical aspects of illness episodes or narratives in time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Graphical and Computationally Intensive Techniques for Presenting and Disseminating Information About the Genetics of Disease

Leeming

2011

Science Communication

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Exactly how genetic factors contribute to the onset of disease is not fully understood. All the same, information and images pertaining to genetics and disease remain arguably serviceable when they produce agreeable diagnostic, prognostic, and, ultimately, therapeutic results. This article begins with a historical survey of graphical techniques concerning hereditary disease. The article then goes on to show how information gathering and representation broadened steadily to accommodate genetic diagnostic tests. This leads, in a final step, to an examination of the capacity of computational genetics and genomics to generate working models of what causes disease.

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Storytelling, statistics and hereditary thought: the narrative support of early statistics

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”: Sir Francis Galton and the genesis of the psychometric paradigm

“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”: Sir Francis Galton and the genesis of the psychometric paradigm

Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding: Historical Background for Festetics’s Organic and Genetic Laws Four Decades Before Mendel’s Experiments in Peas

Graphical and Computationally Intensive Techniques for Presenting and Disseminating Information About the Genetics of Disease

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