Not really - Edit 3
Before modification by darius_sedai at 30/10/2012 02:52:30 PM
In the real world a global statistic could be that 30% of the world population is of Chinese decent ... But if you were to take a random sample of 1000 people in Sweden the odds are you will come up with far fewer people of Chinese decent. Further if you took 1000 people who were In Sweden and were Political Science majors looking to enter a Masters Program you may well have even fewer.
Do you seriously not see that "living in Sweden" is way more likely to be correlated with "not being Chinese" than "wanting to become Aes Sedai" to be correlated with "quite a lot weaker than average, even though I don't know I can channel yet"?
Ad I didn't say I believed genetics had nothing to do with strength. Clearly the Soul plays a part, but we've seen too many examples of breeding creating Channelers of strength... Talaan and her whole family for instance.
Ok, fair enough. So to return to the original point, isn't it then possible that the curve could have shifted since the Age of Legends, for genetic reasons?
Swedish people in general are also more likely to be much taller than Chinese people if you prefer to use height as the example, or have a higher percentage of blonde than etc.... The point being there are going to be regional variations based on genetics/breeding.
No the overall BC would not have shifted. Certainly it has in specific regions, making it possible for the TR to breed more Channelers and stronger Channelers and potentially the region where the AS picked up these 1000 to breed fewer and/or weaker. But in the overall scheme the Curve is the Curve, RJ was speaking of the present day when he was quoted on the 62.5% and he made no caveats about current day strength etc ...
You can believe that 1000 is not a tiny sample, but no statistician would ever tell you that a regionally confined sample representing such a small % of a population is reliably projectable as a sample. Things we can assume about the WoT populacation. There are a dozen or so cities of significant size representing in the ballpark of 8-10MM people. With the population being heavily skewed outside of the cities we can assume a total population in the Westlands of maybe 50M. This means in just this population there should be roughly 250k women with the ability. Factor in Seanchan Aiel, Sea Folk and Shara, and we may be looking at a channeling population of over 1M and from vastly varied regions and genetic circumstances. Sharans from what we know actively breed the trait so it's possible they have increased the % of the population to 3% or maybe higher if that is possible. Seanchan effectively eliminate all Sparkers from the breeding pool, but nearly all female non-Spakers are found and are given places of high standing and likely breed normally. We've seen more strong women among the Aiel and SF than maybe we should have (I'll leave that to speculation since the author tended to put stronger Channelers at the forefront of his story lines).
Net result is we don't have anywhere close to a representative sample with what amounts to about 1% of 1% and that number is heavily regionally skewed. It would be like trying to project something on a global scale based only on the population on Topeka Kansas. Some things will likely work out, but the regional bias will have a heavy effect.