Human Nature After Essence: 3 Population Statistics vs Individual Ontology

Introduction: The Seduction of the Average

Once we recognise patterns without essentialising them, a new challenge emerges: statistical regularities are often misread as truths about individual ontology. This post examines how averages and distributions can mislead, and how maintaining an individual-oriented perspective preserves explanatory openness.

---

1. Statistics Describe Populations, Not Individuals

Population-level patterns — means, medians, modes, or distributions — are extremely useful for understanding trends:

• they capture the frequency and recurrence of behaviours or capacities,

• they reveal structural tendencies,

• they inform potential constraints and enablements.

But these measures do not determine the ontological status of any given individual. Statistical regularity is not intrinsic necessity.

---

2. The Illusion of Predictive Certainty

It is tempting to treat population regularities as explanatory shortcuts:

• if most humans prefer X, then any individual does,

• if a capacity is common, it is inherent,

• if a pattern is frequent, it must be essential.

These shortcuts create illusionary certainty, masking the relational and contingent processes that produce actual outcomes.

---

3. Individuals as Sites of Actualisation

Each individual is an instance of relational processes:

• actualised within a network of interactions,

• responsive to local constraints and enablements,

• enacting possibilities rather than inheriting essences.

Population statistics describe the field of potentialities, not the constitution of any specific person.

---

4. Why the Confusion Persists

Averaging is rhetorically compelling. It simplifies complexity, and our cognitive instinct seeks clear patterns. But the price is ontological compression:

• variance is obscured,

• contingency is erased,

• individual meaning and coordination are overlooked.

Recognising the limits of statistical inference keeps explanation open, and prevents closure from being imposed on relational phenomena.

---

Conclusion: Reading Statistics Relationally

Statistics are powerful tools for describing population-level tendencies. But they are not explanations of individual ontology.

By holding this distinction clearly, we can appreciate stability without necessity, regularity without reification, and statistical tendency without ontological imposition.

The next post will examine Regularity vs Necessity, further clarifying how patterns of human nature can exist without implying determinism or essence.