There is an important piece of historical trivia involving Galton and regression.  Galton documented regression to the mean.  But why did it happen?  In an era before genetics was understood the most natural explanation was that each species and race had &quot;a natural type&quot; that it was regressing to.  This contradicted Darwin&#x27;s theory of evolution, and lead to widespread doubts about Darwin&#x27;s theory until Fischer managed to demonstrate why statistics + Mendelian genetics predicted regression to the mean, and provided a possible mechanism for Darwin&#x27;s theory of evolution.<p>It is natural to view history as a steady march of progress to our current scientific consensus.  But history doesn&#x27;t actually look like that.  And this is an interesting example where it doesn&#x27;t.