Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6. Statistics
X-ray structure of a DNA decamer containing 7,8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine. PDB
entry183D. Image produced with PDB Structure Explorer.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't
there.
—
Charles Darwin
Although Gregor Mendel is often credited with quantifying biology, in reality the ancient Babylonians
created tabulations of agricultural yields and related transactions several millennia earlier. Even
earlier civilizations tracked the population of herds using pictographs on the walls of caves. However,
not much changed in the way that population data were recorded for several decades after Mendel's
death. For example, the 1870 and 1880 U.S. censuses were tabulated by hand—a process requiring
about as much time as it took to sequence the human genome. As a result, the analysis of census
data was not available until just before the next census was started. Things changed in 1890 when
