Nassim Taleb has a great bit on it: characteristics of "natural" systems tend to settle on gaussian distribution on a long enough time frame. Weight, life span,

Nassim Taleb has a great bit on it: characteristics of "natural" systems tend to settle on gaussian distribution on a long enough time frame. Weight, life span, force, height, skills... On the other end, systems that we have created have metrics that tend to not follow the normal law: money, electricity consumption, size of houses, etc. It's not a perfect match and I'm not trying to write a white paper on anything. It's just a way to warm up the reader to the essay point.