At the start of the twentieth century, the dilettantish Victorian approach to racial science came under attack by a new generation of anthropologists who favoured standardised investigative techniques allied to modern modes of mathematical analysis. Statisticians such as Francis Galton and Karl Pearson insisted that the only legitimate form of racial research was that informed by the most advanced statistical methods. The vehicle of Pearson’s new ‘biometrical’ school in London was the journal Biometrika, launched in 1901 to promote this new vision of modern racial research. Bluntly rejecting the work of nineteenth-century anthropologists, Biometrika not only advocated a more rigorous method of evaluating population differences, but also lampooned traditional approaches from a ‘mathematico-statistical’ standpoint. The biometrical school explicitly reformed Victorian methods of racial research, such as craniology, to inform a statistically-driven model of human evolution that tracked diversity within and between racial groups. However, their new brand of racial science shared many of the assumptions of earlier practitioners who assumed a link between physical and mental development, and who advanced a prejudiced agenda that emphasised differences over similarities. While claiming that their new form of statistical research was more ‘objective’ than that of their predecessors, Biometrika revealed that underlying attitudes towards race remained static in spite of the methodological shift its founders heralded.