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Book Review


Nature Medicine 7, 885 - 886 (2001)
doi:10.1038/90908

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

John D. Potter1

  1. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Seattle, Washington, USA

The word 'statistics' has two meanings—the use of numbers to describe whole patterns of activity (for example, baseball statistics), and the analytic methods that allow manipulation of such data. The collection of descriptive biological data (the first 'statistics'), in order to provide the quantitative underpinning for a Darwinian view of the natural world, necessarily led to the development of the second.