>For example, height. Males are on average
>slightly taller than females. But if I were to tell you
>"You will shortly meet two people. One is a native Thai adult male,
>raised in Thailand. The other is a native Masai woman, raised in East
>Africa". >You would lose money (on average) betting that the male will be
>taller. Other
>factors swamp the gender bias.
Interestingly it has been recently shown that 70% of the variation in height is accounted for by ONE gene held on the X chromosome. Which explains why XXX or XXY people are taller than average.
Sorry for the vagueness of the above: this is from memory from a report I read in New Scientist a few weeks ago. If someone has better details please post them, obviously its was a great surprise to find that one gene accounted for so much variation.
best, patrick
Patrick Wilken http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~patrickw/ Editor: PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness Secretary: The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ http://www.phil.vt.edu/ASSC/