On the Measurement of Relative Variability

Abstract

The fact that elephants may have a standard deviation of 50 mm for some linear dimension and shrews a standard deviation of .5 mm for the same dimension does not necessarily mean that the ele,phants are more variable, in the essential zoological sense, than shrews. The elephants are one hundred times the size of shrews in any case, and we should expect the absolute variation also to be about a hundred times as great without any essential difference in functional variability.