Speaker Gingrich recently proposed to gauge citizen outrage at IRS abuses based on an invitation mailed to aggrieved taxpayers asking them to tell their stories. But the most distressing sample error is one introduced for no apparent reason other than pure chance. A good example can be found from the September 25 Houston Chronicle story on research published in the prestigious journal Nature and issued from a distinguished group of evolutionary biologists. They examined Liverpool schoolchildren born to 301 couples in England and Wales from 1911 to 1952 and discovered that the older the husband and the younger the wife, the more likely the firstborn would be a boy. But before Strom Thurmond's phone starts ringing wildly, you need to know the rest of the story.
Statistical anomalies are, unfortunately, as real as regularities.