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Francis Galton used measurement of family resemblance to develop ideas that became central to regression and correlation. In his stature study, he grouped offspring heights by adjusted parental height and found that average offspring deviations were smaller than parental deviations. The Galton's stature regression article reconstructs his grouped data and the approximately two-thirds slope. This is a motivating example of regression toward the mean, rather than a law that every child must be closer to the population mean.^[ref]

His statistical programme was also bound up with advocacy of eugenics. UCL's institutional history documents the racial and social hierarchies behind that programme and the endowment that helped establish its early statistics department. That history belongs alongside his mathematical contributions.^[ref]