Karl Pearson (1857-1936): Mathematician, biometrician and eugenicist

Pearson was Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College London (from 1884). He was elected FRS in 1896. With W. F. R. Weldon, professor of zoology at UCL, Pearson founded biometry. Biometry, a term coined in 1893 to signify the ‘measurement of life’, took the problem of evolution as essentially a statistical problem. Pearson traced his initial biometric innovations to Weldon’s approach to evolution and natural selection. Pearson was trying to find ways of statistically describing the biological material brought to him by Weldon. Later, between 1914 and 1930, Pearson applied Francis Galton’s statistical methods.

From the 1890s Pearson became a pioneer of statistical techniques, contributing both correlation methods and the chi-squared test. In 1900 Pearson, Weldon and Galton founded Biometrika, a ‘Journal for the Statistical Study of Biological Problems’. The mission of the journal was to oppose Bateson’s ideas of heredity and Mendelian genetics. Pearson thought that Mendel’s principles covered only a few special cases of heredity.

In 1903 Pearson established the Drapers’ Biometric Laboratory. The lab researched theoretical and applied statistics and constructed statistical tables. In 1907 Pearson took over a unit founded by Galton for research on human pedigrees and reorganised it as the Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics. A bequest from Galton led to Pearson becoming the first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics in 1911. In that year he formed the Department of Applied Statistics into which he incorporated the Biometric and Galton laboratories.

Magnello has recently argued that Pearson did not completely reject Mendelism, the idea that he did so, commonly believed in the twentieth century, was promulgated by Bateson. She argues that by 1911 Pearson sought a reconciliation of biometry, Darwinism and Mendelism.

LINKS

Magnello on Pearson and Mendelism: http://www.ishpssb.org/ocs/viewabstract.php?id=221

Biographies:

See also:

T. M. Porter, Karl Pearson: the Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004.

D. R. Cox, ‘Biometrika: The First 100 Years’, Biometrika, 88 (2001): 3-11.

E. Magnello, ‘Biometrics, Statistical Biology, and Mathematical Statistics’, pp. 83-84 in A Reader’s Guide to the History of Science, ed. A. Hessenbruch (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).

E. Magnello, ‘Karl Pearson’s Mathematization of Inheritance: from Ancestral Heredity to Mendelian Genetics (1895-1909), Annals of Science, 55 (1998): 35-94.

D. A. Mackenzie, Statistics in Britain 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Robert Olby, ‘The dimensions of scientific controversy: the biometric-Mendelian debate’, British Journal for the History of Science, 22 (1989), p. 299-320.