This book builds a much-needed bridge between biostatistics and organismal biology by linking the arithmetic of statistical studies of organismal form to the biological inferences that may follow from it. It incorporates a cascade of new explanations of regression, correlation, covariance analysis, and principal components analysis, before applying these techniques to an increasingly common data resource: the description of organismal forms by sets of landmark point configurations. For each data set, multiple analyses are interpreted and compared for insight into the relation between the arithmetic of the measurements and the rhetoric of the subsequent biological explanations. The text includes examples that range broadly over growth, evolution, and disease. For graduate students and researchers alike, this book offers a unique consideration of the scientific context surrounding the analysis of form in today's biosciences.
In Measuring and Reasoning, Fred L. Bookstein examines the way ordinary arithmetic and numerical patterns are translated into scientific understanding, showing how the process relies on two carefully managed forms of argument: • Abduction: the generation of new hypotheses to accord with findings that were surprising on previous hypotheses, and • Consilience: the confirmation of numerical pattern claims by analogous findings at other levels of measurement. These profound principles include an understanding of the role of arithmetic and, more importantly, of how numerical patterns found in one study can relate to numbers found in others. More than 200 figures and diagrams illuminate the text. The book can be read with profit by any student of the empirical nature or social sciences and by anyone concerned with how scientists persuade those of us who are not scientists why we should credit the most important claims about scientific facts or theories.
Morphometrics is the statistical study of biological shape and shape change. Its richest data are landmarks, points such as 'the bridge of the nose' that have biological names as well as geometric locations. This book is the first systematic survey of morphometric methods for landmark data. The methods presented here combine conventional multivariate statistical analysis with themes from plane and solid geometry and from biomathematics to support biological insights into the features of many different organs and organisms. This book will be of value to applied statisticians and geometers, as well as to all biological and biomedical researchers who need quantitative analyses of information from biomedical images.
This is the first textbook of Virtual Anthropology, the new science that combines elements from fields as diverse as anthropology, medicine, statistics, computing, scientific visualization, and indust
