Whose name is associated with ‘Father of the Eugenics’?

Concept — Eugenics is the study of improving the inherited qualities of a human population by encouraging reproduction among people judged to carry desirable traits and discouraging it among others. The word itself is built from the Greek eu ("good, well") and genos ("born"). To call someone the "father" of a discipline means that person both founded the field and gave it its name.

Application — The scholar who coined the term "eugenics" in 1883, in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, was Francis Galton, a British polymath and a cousin of Charles Darwin. He had already argued in Hereditary Genius (1869), using pedigree studies and the normal curve, that outstanding ability runs in families; he then went on, through the 1880s, to develop the statistical methods of regression and correlation that turned the study of inheritance into a quantitative science. Founding that programme of research and giving it its name is what earns him the title Father of Eugenics, so Galton is the name that belongs in the blank.

Cross-check — the other three names belong to different strands of educational psychology, not to the founding of eugenics:

• Crow and Crow — the author pair quoted in teacher-education courses for their definitions of educational psychology and their account of adolescent growth.

• Ross — quoted for describing education as a deliberate and conscious process and for the treatment of instincts and emotions as the springs of behaviour.

• Woodworth — associated with dynamic psychology, the S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) formulation, and the statement that development is the product of heredity and environment.

None of these three founded or named the science of improving inherited human qualities, which is why the association named in the question rests with Galton.