On Laws V: The Law of Statistical Regularity

"This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual: in the mass he is a mathematical problem." (Robert Chambers, "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation", 1844) 

"the law of statistical regularity lays down that the moderately large number of items chosen at random from a large group are almost sure on the average to possess the characteristics of the large group." (Willford I King, "The Elements of Statistical Method", 1912)

"The principle underlying sampling is that a set of objects taken at random from a larger group tends to reproduce the characteristics of that larger group: this is called the Law of Statistical Regularity. There are exceptions to this rule, and a certain amount of judgment must be exercised, especially when there are a few abnormally large items in the larger group. With erratic data, the accuracy of sampling can often be tested by comparing several samples. On the whole, the larger the sample the more closely will it tend to resemble the population from which it is taken; too small a sample would not give reliable results." (Lewis R Connor, "Statistics in Theory and Practice", 1932)

"It is the task of science, as a collective human undertaking, to describe from the external side, (on which alone agreement is possible), such statistical regularity as there is in a world in which every event has a unique aspect, and to indicate where possible the limits of such description. It is not part of its task to make imaginative interpretation of the internal aspect of reality - what it is like, for example, to be a lion, an ant or an ant hill, a liver cell, or a hydrogen ion. The only qualification is in the field of introspective psychology in which each human being is both observer and observed, and regularities may be established by comparing notes. Science is thus a limited venture. It must act as if all phenomena were deterministic at least in the sense of determinable probabilities." (Sewall Wright, "Gene and Organism", American Naturalist 87, 1953)

"The epistemological value of probability theory is based on the fact that chance phenomena, considered collectively and on a grand scale, create non-random regularity." (Andrey Kolmogorov, "Limit Distributions for Sums of Independent Random Variables", 1954)

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." (Charles A E Goodhart, "Problems of Monetary Management: the U.K. Experience", 1975)

 "The law of statistical regularity lays down that a group of objects chosen at random from a larger group tends to possess the characteristics of that large group (universe)." (Lewis R Connor)