“Regression to the Mean”: The Confluence of Eugenics and Statistics in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The work of this thesis is twofold — first, qualitatively characterizing the confluence between the British eugenics and statistics movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and second, quantitatively analyzing the effect of this foundation on pedagogical materials in the growing field of statistics between 1880 and 1970. Towards the first goal, the history of the method of least squares, state statistics, and positive and negative eugenics are outlined, followed by a close reading of the foundational texts authored by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson that introduced linear regression. Towards the latter goal, English-language statistics textbooks published between 1880 and 1970 are analyzed using text-mining algorithms to establish the extent of their co-existence with hereditary and eugenic studies.