Natural Process Variation?

It's been a long time for me, but I'll give a shot at interpreting that wiki page for you.

Natural process variation is a measurement of how much some measurable value varies during a process such as manufacturing. It's not enough to just measure the average, because the average may be right on target, but the individual values may wander all over the place around that average ... and this may be unacceptable.

So we need to measure how much this wanders. Instead of the average, we measure the standard deviation (sigma), which I'm sure you are studying somewhere.

While this is a concept from (SPC) statistical process control (like manufacturing), I've not seen it applied to biology. (I hope it's not an accident that you posted this in the biology section ... when asking questions like this, you might want to give more background about what class you are taking, and how this came up.)

But I can see an application to this to studying the basic concept of "variation" in biology, which is the fuel for evolution. For example, we could measure the standard deviation for some trait like forearm length, or the beak lengths in a species of finch.

Variation is achieved when two individuals of the same species (but each having slight differences in their genetic makeup) mate. This produces offspring that have some of the "father" and some of the "mother" but is not exactly the same as either one.

problematic subject. search in google or bing. that might help!