Galton's problem
Galton's problemThe Galton problem is named after Francis Galton, the 19th-century British polymath, who became embroiled in a celebrated exchange about the logic of comparative analysis with the anthropologist Edward Tylor. In 1889, Tylor published an article which purported to show clear correlations between the economic and familial institutions of a wide range of past and present societies, and attempted to explain these in terms of their functions. Galton's rejoinder argued that correlations between social institutions might not only arise under pressure of functional exigencies (that is, through processes operating within societies), but also as an effect of cultural diffusion between societies. In this way he questioned Tylor's assumption that each of his national cases represented an independent observation (see...
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