A Note on Over- and Under-Representation Among Populations with Normally-Distributed Traits
share
Among several subpopulations of a given species with a normally-distributed trait, such as height, blood pressure, or various test scores in humans, one and only one of the subpopulations will always strongly dominate all the others in the right tail, that is, in the high-end values of that trait. Examples are given to show that this is not true in general for other common classes of continuous centrally-symmetric unimodal distributions such as Laplace, nor even for other bell-shaped distributions such as Cauchy.
READ FULL TEXT