2.1 Telling different weights apart

While studying at Cambridge, Francis Galton noticed that his brightest classmates all came from families with equally brilliant minds. From this, he hypothesised that intelligence could be passed down from one generation to the next, just like eye colour — a matter of nature, not culture.

But to study the heredity of intelligence, one first needs to measure it. Galton initially believed intelligence might depend on skull size — and, around the same time in Turin, Cesare Lombroso was developing the (later disproven) idea that the shape of a skull could predict a person’s likelihood of committing crimes. Unsatisfied with the results of skull measurements, Galton proposed instead that a sharper mind might be linked to sharper senses.

He designed tests like the one you can try here: can you place the weights on the first tray in increasing order? And on the next ones?

But above all: do you think Galton’s method was a good way to measure intelligence?