The Development of Chance and Statistics in Evolutionary Biology

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a research project in the history of evolutionary biology. Specifically, the project will provide an account of how statistical methods came to be used in evolutionary theory, along with the notion of chance which supported the use of these methods. Darwin's own theory of evolution by natural selection was a non-mathematical, non-statistical theory of the unfolding history of life on earth. The research supported by this project will eventually be published as a scholarly book that captures these developments in a clear and rigorous manner. This grant will also fund a one-day workshop with the PI and secondary education teachers, designed to produce publicly accessible, free-of-charge curricular materials which bring the results of the historical and philosophical work developed here to science classrooms. This history of science project will capture one of the most remarkable developments during the first few decades following Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species; namely, the rapid diffusion of statistical methodology and the multifaceted roles for the concept of chance across evolutionary biology. The biologists involved in this project--the biometrical school of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, W.F.R Weldon, and the architects of the Modern Synthesis, especially R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J.B.S. Haldane--are well known. But the precise views of these figures, their philosophical rationales for introducing concepts of chance and statistical methodology, when and how they did so, and the ways in which these ideas were transmitted during this pivotal period of the history of biology are all poorly understood. This project will provide a philosophically and historically sophisticated analysis of the introduction of chance and statistics and their transmission into the Modern Synthesis. By refining our views of how these concepts act in evolutionary biology today, the results of this project have the potential to impact a wide array of fields of knowledge, such as the theological response to evolutionary theory or the suitability of a univocal concept of human nature in a post-Darwinian world. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.