Francis Galton

Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a Victorian polymath — a cousin of Charles Darwin who worked across statistics, psychology, meteorology, and (more troublingly) eugenics, which he founded and named. The result that matters to this vault is his 1907 note in Nature, "Vox Populi," which showed that the median guess of a large crowd at a country-fair ox-weighing contest landed within 1% of the ox's true weight — the founding demonstration that aggregated independent judgments can outperform most individual experts.

He matters to this vault as the 101-year-old benchmark the experimental social-influence literature measures itself against: Lorenz, Rauhut, Schweitzer & Helbing (2011) open their own paper by invoking Galton's result and then show the specific condition — exposure to others' estimates — under which it breaks down. His name reached the vault only as a citation inside that 2011 paper, not from an independently read primary; the "Vox Populi" claim above is treated as uncontested historical fact (per the sourcing floor's allowance for historical/biographical claims at Tier 3–4), not as a sourced claim-note in its own right.

References

• claim-lorenz-rauhut-schweitzer-helbing-2011-no-information-baseline-makes-convergence-diagnostic — the paper that frames its own experiment as a test of when Galton's result holds and when it doesn't.