Galton {mosaicData}

Galton's dataset of parent and child heights

Description

In the 1880's, Francis Galton was developing ways to quantify the heritability of traits. As part of this work, he collected data on the heights of adult children and their parents.

Usage

data(Galton)

Format

A data frame with 898 observations on the following variables.

family

a factor with levels for each family

father

the father's height (in inches)

mother

the mother's height (in inches)

sex

the child's sex: F or M

height

the child's height as an adult (in inches)

nkids

the number of adult children in the family, or, at least, the number whose heights Galton recorded.

Details

Entries were deleted for those children whose heights were not recorded numerically by Galton, who sometimes used entries such as "tall", "short", "idiotic", "deformed" and so on.

Source

The data were transcribed by J.A. Hanley who has published them at http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/galton/

References

"Transmuting" women into men: Galton's family data on human stature. (2004) The American Statistician, 58(3):237-243.

Examples

data(Galton)