Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups purported to be inferior or promoting that of those purported to be superior.
Pangenesis was Charles Darwin's hypothetical mechanism for heredity, in which he proposed that each part of the body continually emitted its own type of small organic particles called gemmules that aggregated in the gonads, contributing heritable information to the gametes. He presented this 'provisional hypothesis' in his 1868 work The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, intending it to fill what he perceived as a major gap in evolutionary theory at the time. The etymology of the word comes from the Greek words pan and genesis ("birth") or genos ("origin"). Pangenesis mirrored ideas originally formulated by Hippocrates and other pre-Darwinian scientists, but using new concepts such as cell theory, explaining cell development as beginning with gemmules which were specified to be necessary for the occurrence of new growths in an organism, both in initial development and regeneration. It also accounted for regeneration and the Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as a body part altered by the environment would produce altered gemmules. This made Pangenesis popular among the neo-Lamarckian school of evolutionary thought. This hypothesis was made effectively obsolete after the 1900 rediscovery among biologists of Gregor Mendel's theory of the particulate nature of inheritance.
Sir Francis Galton was a British polymath and the originator of the behavioral genetics movement during the Victorian era.
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, as his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Richard Dawkins declared Fisher to be the greatest of Darwin's successors. He is also considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism. According to statistician Jeffrey T. Leek, Fisher is the most influential scientist of all time based off the number of citations of his contributions.
Karl Pearson was an English biostatistician, eugenicist, and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths.
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ.
George Robert Price was an American population geneticist. Price is often noted for his formulation of the Price equation in 1967.
The Galton Laboratory was a laboratory established for the research of eugenics, later to the study of biometry and statistics, and eventually human genetics based at University College London (UCL) in London, England. The laboratory was originally established in 1904 and existed in name until 2020.
"The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" is a scientific paper by Ronald Fisher which was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1918,.
Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was a British statistician and geneticist. Smith was born in Leicester. He was the younger son of John Bardell Smith (1876–1950), a mechanical engineer, and Ada. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys until 1929, when the family moved to London. His education continued at Bec School, Tooting, for three years, then at University College School, London. In 1935, although having failed his Higher School Certificate, he was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in the Mathematical Tripos, with a First in Part II in 1937 and a Distinction in Part III in 1938. Following graduation he began postgraduate research, taking his PhD in 1942.
Julia Bell MA Dubl (1901) MRCS LRCP (1920) MRCP (1926) FRCP (1938) was one of the pioneers of eugenics and human genetics. Her early career as a statistical assistant to Karl Pearson (1857–1936) marked the beginning of a lifelong professional association with the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College London. Bell's work as a human geneticist was based on her statistical investigations into the inheritance of anomalies and diseases of the eye, nervous diseases, muscular dystrophies, and digital anomalies.
The Adelphi Genetics Forum is a non-profit learned society based in the United Kingdom. Its aims are "to promote the public understanding of human heredity and to facilitate informed debate about the ethical issues raised by advances in reproductive technology."
Biometrika is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for the Biometrika Trust. The editor-in-chief is Paul Fearnhead. The principal focus of this journal is theoretical statistics. It was established in 1901 and originally appeared quarterly. It changed to three issues per year in 1977 but returned to quarterly publication in 1992.
William Fleetwood Sheppard FRSE LLM Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.
Ethel Mary Elderton (1878–1954) was a British biometrician, statistician and eugenics researcher who worked with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.
The Ronald Fisher bibliography contains the works published by the English statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher (1890–1962).
Harry Harris FRS, FCRP was a British-born biochemist. His work showed that human genetic variation was not rare and disease-causing but instead was common and usually harmless. He was the first to demonstrate, with biochemical tests, that with the exception of identical twins we are all different at the genetic level. This work paved the way for many well-known genetic concepts and procedures such as DNA fingerprinting, the prenatal diagnosis of disorders using genetic markers, the extensive heterogeneity of inherited diseases, and the mapping of human genes to chromosomes
Newton Ennis Morton was an American population geneticist and one of the founders of the field of genetic epidemiology.
Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences is a book by Francis Galton about the genetic inheritance of intelligence. It was first published in 1869 by Macmillan Publishers. The first American edition was published by D. Appleton & Company in 1870. It was Galton's first major work written from a hereditarian perspective. It was later referred to as "the first serious study of the inheritance of intelligence" and as "the beginning of scientific interest in the topic of genius."
In statistical genetics, Haseman–Elston (HE) regression is a form of statistical regression originally proposed for linkage analysis of quantitative traits for sibling pairs. It was first developed by Joseph K. Haseman and Robert C. Elston in 1972. A much earlier source of sib-pair linkage implementation was, in 1935 and 1938, proposed by Lionel S. Penrose, who is father of Nobel laureate theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. In 2000, Elston et al. proposed a "revisited", extended form of Haseman–Elston regression. Since then, further extensions to the "revisited" form of HE regression have been proposed. Although HE regression "...seems a rusty weapon in the genomics analysis armory of the GWAS era. This is because the HE regression relies on relatedness measured on IBD but not identity by state (IBS)...", HE has been adapted for association analysis in unrelated samples, whose relatedness is measured in IBS.
