Francis Galton
A restless Victorian explorer, freed by inheritance from ever needing a job, who turned a sweet-pea experiment into the idea of regression to the mean and went on to invent the correlation coefficient -- work permanently entangled with the eugenics movement he also founded
Francis Galton discovered regression toward the mean while studying sweet-pea seed diameters and went on to define the correlation coefficient, both growing out of his obsession with human heredity. This bio covers his restless early career as an explorer, his cousin relationship to Charles Darwin, the anthropometric laboratory that became the forerunner of Karl Pearson's Biometric Laboratory, his fingerprint classification system still echoed in police work today, and the eugenics movement he founded on the same hereditarian premises -- a legacy this bio treats honestly rather than omitting.