![]() On the narrative we argue against, Galton’s explanation for this phenomenon changed through his career from a biological explanation to a statistical one (Hacking, 1990 Pearl & Mackenzie, 2018 Stigler, 1999, 2016 Witteveen, 2019). ![]() Regression towards mediocrity was the fact that offspring of parents who deviated significantly from the mean tended on the average to deviate less than their parents. This paper will criticize what has become a common narrative regarding Galton’s work on regression towards mediocrity. These works led to Galton’s development of the concepts of regression and correlation, as well as to his conclusions regarding inheritance and evolution. As we shall see in the next section, the underlying theme that connected most of these various works were his eugenic motivations: his deep conviction that differences between people, mental as well as physical, were hereditary, and his attempts to understand the processes by which traits were inherited. From around 1865 onwards, Galton began studying the processes of heredity as well as variations in human traits. ![]() He also conducted meteorological research, which may have inspired his later statistical work (Cowan, 1972, pp. These expeditions seem to have made a lasting impact on his views on racial differences and human psychology (Fancher, 1983 Stocking, 1987). Galton joined expeditions around Africa, and made numerous contributions to the Royal Geographical Society (Porter, 1986, p. In the years that followed he turned his journeys into scientific endeavors. After leaving Cambridge, he decided to travel, the considerable inheritance he received after his father’s death freeing him from the need to make a living. During his time in Cambridge he suffered from two mental breakdowns preventing him from finishing his degree (Porter, 1986, p. At age 18, with the encouragement of his older cousin Charles Darwin, he quit his medical studies and went on to study mathematics at Cambridge (Gillham, 2001, p. The historical account we reject foregrounds the development of statistical thinking over Galton’s other pursuits.įrancis Galton was born to a Quaker family of the upper social classes in Britain and was designated to become a physician like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin (Porter, 1986, p. In this paper, we argue that paying close attention to Francis Galton’s views about heredity and to his anthropological concerns compels us to revisit his role in the history of the concept of regression to the mean as it is often described in the history of biology and statistics. It is often claimed that while undertaking this work he discovered the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean and that this discovery was a pivotal moment in the history of statistical thinking. Motivated by eugenic concerns, he studied patterns of human heredity. It was in the context of this debate and specifically by the biometricians, that the development of the statistical explanation was originally attributed to Galton.įrancis Galton (1822–1911) was a scientific polymath who made pioneering contributions to several fields, including the study of heredity in populations and the statistical analysis of data. The statistical explanation attributed to Galton appeared later, during the biometrician-mutationist debate in the early 1900s. This view had implications concerning both natural selection and eugenics. Galton used regression towards mediocrity to support the claim that some biological types were more stable than others and hence were resistant to evolutionary change. While the common narrative focuses almost exclusively on Galton’s statistics, our arguments emphasize the anthropological and biological questions that Galton addressed. ![]() Arguing against this claim, we show that Galton did not explain regression towards mediocrity statistically, and did not give up on his ideas regarding an inheritance process that caused offspring to revert to the mean. It is claimed that after 1885, Galton came to explain the fact that offspring deviated less from the mean value of the population than their parents did as a population-level statistical phenomenon and not as the result of the processes of inheritance. ![]() A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis Galton. ![]()
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