Francis Galton

From FutureNovo - Anticipating things to come

Sir Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was a noted English polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.

Of particular interest in relation to collective intelligence was Galton's work dealing with group decision making. As James Surowiecki relates in The Wisdom of Crowds, one day in the autumn of 1906, Galton attended the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Fair, an annual regional livestock fair. There he came upon a weight judging competition in which the weight of a particular ox was to be guessed after it had been slaughtered and dressed. Over 800 people entered the contest, ranging from butchers and livestock experts to people with no specialized knowledge. Following the event, Galton borrowed the tickets listing the participants' guesses and ran a number of statistical tests on them. Expecting the average voter to be far off the mark, he was extremely surprised to find that the average was closer than the guess of any single individual. The crowd had estimated the final weight to be 1,197 pounds. The actual weight: 1,198 pounds.