Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI (/ˈɡɔːltən/; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician and a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism. He was knighted in 1909.