Galton misunderstood the normal distribution. He needed it to represent inherent, stable traits—measurable properties of fixed biological types. That’s because he was looking for a way to reassert pure categories after Darwin had destabilized typological certainty.
So he reinterpreted the central limit theorem—which in fact shows how normal curves emerge when systems are embedded in many interdependent, relational influences—into a proof of internal essence. He treated deviation as error, and the mean as norm, collapsing emergence into hierarchy.
To make that stick, Galton needed more than statistics—he needed epistemic architecture. That’s why Kantsaywhere matters. He doesn’t just nod to Kant for effect. He rebuilds Kant’s structure:
Fixed a priori categories,
A sealed observer perspective,
Reason as norm-producing and difference-filtering.
That's hilarious, fantastic and terrible. It's not the later 19th use of Kant I'm familiar with, but I don't know that much about the British context. Thank you!
Of course I hope I didn’t flood you with too long of an answer but I’ve been really getting into the history of eugenics and trying to understand how much of its legacy still resides in statistics especially where circular arguments and purity logic show up.
I really think we cling to Kant because he solved some debates that were happening and got the European enlightenment on the same page, but he did it through epistemic closure which is why he needed to invent a circle of whiteness and establish blackness as the edge of reason and it sucks
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Fixed a priori categories,
A sealed observer perspective,
Reason as norm-producing and difference-filtering.
Meanwhile, William Bateson, who coined the term “genetics,” saw exactly what was being lost.