This was Francis Galton, a British polymath of the 19th and early 20th century, who observed that certain characteristics of parents -such as height- are not passed on completely to their children. If parents' heights lie at the tails of the distribution in both directions, the heights of their children tend to lie closer to the mean of the distribution. Simply speaking, tall parents have kids shorter then they are, and short parents have kids taller than they are.
Galton invented what we today now as linear regression.
The article says that the Dutch children are now shorter than their parents. I was wondering whether this is simply a manifestation of the regression toward the mean, first discovered by Galton (and published in 1886)?