re: The Hardball Times article

the article is right about regression to the mean, but wrong about its historical statements;

(1) "Sir Francis Galton invention regression (and regression to the mean) analysis - this is not correct. Any basic history of statistics will show that this is more due to Karl Pearson's systematization of ideas from Galton than Galton himself. Galton was not much of a quant guy, as several of his books I've read show.

(2) "Galton invented eugenics, which Hitler perfected" Again, wrong. Galton wrote a book in which he suggested that intelligence might be inherited, and therfore people of high intelligence might consider marrying one another. He did later come to endose some forms of the eugenics movement. But the eugenics movements, and most eugenics laws were passed in the United States from 1905-1935. The Nazi race laws of the early 1930s were explicitly based on the United States eugenics and race laws, which themselves authorized the forced sterilization and confinement of the mentally deficient and those women who had had children out of wedlock. The Nazi laws expressly acknowledge the United States laws as their models.

Consequently, it is the US, not the Nazis, who brought eugenics to perfection, and the Nazis who executed it to another level. Even in the 40s, there were still biologists in the US endorsing eugenics, and the last eugenics laws did not come off the books in this country until well into the 1970s.

Sir Francis Galton, by the way, was Charles Darwin's cousing, and well loved by Darwin, as Darwin was by Galton.

--art kyriazis, philly