Thank you so so so much for reposting this. Sorry for the gremlins that got your previous one. 

This is such an important essay. A bit head-exploding in places, at least for me. But this is the important takeaway that I got from it:

We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite
boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death,"
although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its
emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical
measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our
actual world of variation, shadings, and continua.

In short, we view means and medians as the
hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect
measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median
just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a
reasonable interpretation.

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence.
Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and
medians are the abstractions. 

It's all part of living in the now, and remembering that even the best, most well-funded and researched studies still aren't predictors of what will happen to our own pets or people if cancer comes into the picture.