Not all averages are central tendencies as we have defined them above. We
could compute the mean weight of an adult lion, a Mazda car, and a peanut, but no
clear process would be measured here that we could regard as having a central
tendency. One might think that the mean weight of all the lions in a particular zoo
would be a central tendency. But without knowing more about how the lions got
there or their ages, it is questionable whether this mean would necessarily tell us
anything about a process with a central tendency. Quetelet described this distinction
in terms of true means of distributions that follow the law of errors versus arithmetic
means that can be calculated for any assortment of values, such as our hodgepodge
above (see Porter, 1986, p. 107).