Adolphe Quetelet was a French intellectual who introduced statistics to the social sciences. He is best known for creating the body-mass index (BMI), the first biometric, that is still used today. Quetelet inspires our neologism, Queteletan.
Quetelet’s methods ultimately inspired later researchers such as Francis Galton to extend biometrics to psychometrics (IQ), in order to measure more abstract mental processes. Galton, in turn, was the mentor of Karl Pearson, and his methods led to the modern research statistics practices established by Ronald Fisher. This line of research infamously led to late 19th century imperialist misadventures, eugenics programs, and racial generalizations invoking ‘reversions to the mean’.
Quetelet represents the kind of naive empiricism and correlations that plague modern science. BMI is a very poor predictive measure: 25% of people with an obese BMI have excellent cardiovascular health, while 50% of people with a normal BMI have poor cardiovascular health. Yet many doctors and researchers still represent it to patients as a valid metric. Wittgenstein’s ruler is a parable about this source of error.
Quetelet’s ‘social physics’ were contrasted with Auguste Comte’s ‘sociology’ by its focus on statistical analysis. Today, sociology encompasses both fields, but distinguishes between ‘theory’ that traces back to Comte and ’empirical’ analysis that traces back to Quetelet.