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Originally posted by Ramarius:
@Justinain: What issues? The issues discussed at the symposium - which wasn't about evolution v ID but about mathematical models as applied to evolution.

This is the point I was making above. It seems to be impossible to have a rational indisciplinary conversation about evolution without the issue being high jacked by discussions about ID and creationism.

None of the mathematicians who attended Wistar were ID proponents or creationists.

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Originally posted by Justinian:

I've a friend with a PHD in Bioinformatics which is one of these hybrid fields.

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And a lot of statistics was developed through and for biology.

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Very true! Far from geneticists and population biologists ignoring statistics they mostly invented it Pretty much all of the plug-in stats-package stuff that peopel use without really understanding what it does comes out of biology or related fields.

Galton (Darwin's cousin) thought up lots of statistical things including the standard deviation, correlation coefficients, and linear regression. His pupil Karl Person more or less invented what was then known as Biometrics (i.e. the statistical study of biology), the most popular correlation coefficient, statistical tests and the P-value, the chi-squared test, principal component analysis, and the first measurements of skewness and kurtosis. Student's T-test is names after "Student", a pseudonymn of Gossett who was the head brewer at Guiness. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test is named after an industrial chemist who also worked in a plant-breeding lab for a while. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was invented by Spearman (naturally), a psychologist who also developed factor analysis.

The greatest genius of all the early population geneticists, and the main archiutect of the so-called neo-Darwinian Synthesis - lots of people think the greatest of all evolutionary biologists after Darwin - was Ronald Fisher, who spent much of his working life at the Rothampsted Agricultural Reserch station - he improved on Pearsons statistical tests, and he thought up analysis of variance, maximum likelihoood, permutation tests - and of course the F-distribution, F-test, and F-statistics (not that he called them that himself). He was also, for what its worth, a devout Anglican of a rather starchy Victorian politically conservative low-church-liberal sort.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.