> that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution.

But complex clustering isn’t more or less true than the normal distribution in general, it just depends what you’re talking about.

That’s why railing against “the so-called normal distribution” comes across as inappropriate for a serious publication, it is suspiciously lacking nuance. Then one wonders how/why the nuance has gone missing. Politics masquerading as empiricism is an especially gross bait and switch.