In Pursuit of the Gene

26 ¨ REVERSION TO THE MEAN
than all the other criticism, for De Candolle’s Histoire de science and des savants
depuis deux siècles contained a sweeping critique of Galton’s hereditarian interpretation
of mental ability, 9 and Galton had been stewing over the book for
weeks.
Not only had De Candolle challenged Galton’s views, but he criticized
the quality of Galton’s study in Hereditary Genius. “The very title and the first
sentence of his book shows that he regards heredity as the dominant
cause,” De Candolle had written in his Histoire. “I do not see, however that
he has given proof of it nor that he has scrutinized the question in a specialized
enough manner.” Furthermore, he argued that his own approach,
which had resulted in a very different conclusion, was superior. “I employed
completer biographical documents, drawn from French, English,
and German works,” he asserted. “I thus flatter myself to have penetrated
farther into the heart of the question ...Iobviously have a larger and solider
base than that of M. Galton.” 10
Rather than use biographical dictionaries to show that eminence ran in
families, as Galton had in Hereditary Genius, De Candolle had set out to estimate
the percentage of eminent scientists produced by different countries
as measured by their representation among the foreign associates of the
leading German, French, and English scientific societies. In particular, he
had looked at the lists of foreign membership of the Royal Society of London,
the Academy of Sciences of Paris, and the Academy of Berlin in the
years 1750, 1789, 1829, and 1865. As De Candolle pointed out, because foreign
associates were more stringently selected than natives and their choice
was less likely to be influenced by internal politics, on average they would
tend to be more genuinely qualified.
It was immediately and glaringly obvious that countries did not contribute
to the pool of eminent scientists according to their relative sizes. In
fact, De Candolle’s native Switzerland had been the leading contributor for
nearly two hundred years, contributing roughly twelve times the fraction
of members to the Royal Society as would be expected on the basis of its
tiny population (8.2 percent of the foreign members were Swiss, while Switzerland
accounted for only 0.7 percent of the population of Europe). In
contrast, Russia and Poland combined accounted for nearly 20 percent of