Quetelet might say that it did not really matter whether you were 50 percent faster than the average person or 50 percent slower—in either case, you were an equal deviation from the average, embodying equal error and equal distance from perfection. Galton would have disagreed. He said that a person who was 50 percent faster than average was clearly superior to someone 50 percent slower. They were not equal: the faster person represented an individual of higher rank.
