A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis Galton. 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. 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. While the common narrative focuses almost exclusively on Galton’s statistics, our arguments emphasize the anthropological and biological questions that Galton addressed. 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. This view had implications concerning both natural selection and eugenics. The statistical explanation attributed to Galton appeared later, during the biometrician-mutationist debate in the early 1900s. 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.

一种流行的说法是在弗朗西斯·高尔顿的著作中发现了回归均值的统计现象。据称，在 1885 年之后，高尔顿开始解释这样一个事实，即后代偏离人口平均值比他们的父母少，这是一种人口水平的统计现象，而不是遗传过程的结果。反对这一说法，我们表明高尔顿没有从统计学上解释向平庸的回归，也没有放弃他关于导致后代恢复到平均水平的遗传过程的想法。虽然常见的叙述几乎完全集中在高尔顿的统计数据上，但我们的论点强调了高尔顿所解决的人类学和生物学问题。高尔顿使用回归平庸来支持某些生物类型比其他生物类型更稳定并因此抵抗进化变化的说法。这种观点对自然选择和优生学都有影响。归因于高尔顿的统计解释出现在后来，在 1900 年代初期的生物统计学 - 突变论辩论中。正是在这场辩论的背景下，特别是生物统计学家，统计解释的发展最初归功于高尔顿。