Adolphe Quetelet

But how did we get these classifications in the first place? Well, it's time for a mini history lesson.

It all started in the mid-19th century with a Belgian statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, a man considered by some to be the founder of statistics as a scientific discipline.

This guy loved numbers.

He collected data on crime rates, marriage rates, mortality, you name it.

And you have this real rise of trying to, you know, create, as you said, this kind of comparative anatomy, also these ways of measuring the body.

I always think of Quetelet's work because he originated the body mass index, this thing that still persists today, created about 200 years ago.

And the pursuit there was to find what he called the average man, How can I measure? But of course, the data he's drawing from is measurements of the bodies of Belgian soldiers.

And from him, that is the data set by which he's going to create these ideas and indexes and ideals around what an average man should look like, how an average man should be.

And then just the sort of apparatus of race that justifies slavery that we talked about comes out of the, you know, natural natural science scientists.

Right.

has a big influence on Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, who was also inspired by Quetelet's work.

And Galton is – he is measuring bodies too, not BMI per se, but he was –

Underweight, healthy, overweight, obese.

And where did this number actually come from? The story begins in the 1830s with a Belgian mathematician and statistician named Adolphe Quetelet.

Quetelet was fascinated by populations.

He wanted to find statistical patterns in human beings and described what he'd considered the characteristic of the average or normal man.

People seem sheathed in their tough organization.

Ask Spurzane, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet if temperaments decide nothing, or if there be anything they do not decide.

Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told.

Find the part which black eyes, which blue eyes play severally in the company.