2.4 Gaussians all the way down

Gaussians are very appealing from a mathematical point of view. Working with them is relatively easy, and many operations applied to Guassians return another Gaussian. Additionally, many natural phenomena can be nicely approximated using Gaussians; essentially, almost every time that we measure the average of something, using a big enough sample size, that average will be distributed as a Gaussian. The details of when this is true, when this is not true, and when this is more or less true, are elaborated in the central limit theorem (CLT); you may want to stop reading now and search about this really central statistical concept (terrible pun intended).

Well, we were saying that many phenomena are indeed averages. Just to follow a cliché, the height (and almost any other trait of a person, for that matter) is the result of many environmental factors and many genetic factors, and hence we get a nice Gaussian distribution for the height of adult people...