IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561728

Life's Rich Pattern: The Role of Statistics and Probability in Nineteenth Century Argumentation for Theories of Evolution, Variation, and Heredity (2006)

University of Maryland, College Park
Fahnestock, Jeanne
Publication date: 2006
Language: English

Publication Date: 2006
Edition Details: Advisor: Fahnestock, Jeanne
Physical Details: 294 pp.

Outside Links

Heredity Methodology of science; scientific method Evolution Probability and statistics Mathematics and its relationship to science 19th century

Though modern philosophers of science recognize the inappropriateness of the reduction of all scientific investigations to mathematics, mathematics and science share a long history with one another during which mathematics has been employed as a major component of scientific argumentation. Over the last twenty years, rhetoricians have done substantial work studying the role of argumentation in science (Bazerman 1988; Gross 1990, 2002; Myers 1990; Fahnestock 1999); however, despite the importance of mathematics in making scientific arguments, little effort has been made to understand the role mathematics has played in making these arguments. This dissertation represents a move to resolve this shortcoming by investigating the role of mathematics in arguments in evolutionary biology from the middle of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the mass collection and mathematical assessment of data for scientific purposes provides the context for understanding some of the rhetorical choices of an important group of natural philosophers and biologists who developed arguments in the second half of the century about the nature of variation, evolution, and heredity. In the works of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson, arguments from probability and statistics play important roles as support for their arguments and as a source of invention for their claims. This investigation of the rhetorical situations of these four biologists, their arguments, and the role of the principles, operations, and formulae of probability and statistics supports the position that mathematization had a major impact on the nature of scientific evidence in the nineteenth century. What it also suggests is that, though mathematized arguments may have had a great deal of credibility within the scientific community in general, factors such as the stature of the rhetor and of their biological theory within their specific discourse communities played an equally important role in the persuasiveness of their arguments.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/03 (2006). Pub. no. AAT 3212609.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001561728

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article López-Beltrán, Carlos; (2006)
Storytelling, Statistics and Hereditary Thought: The Narrative Support of Early Statistics (/p/isis/citation/CBB000770715/)

Article Pilpel, Avital; (2007)
Statistics Is Not Enough: Revisiting Ronald A. Fisher's Critique (1936) of Mendel's Experimental Results (1866) (/p/isis/citation/CBB000830396/)

Article André Ariew; (2022)
Charles Darwin as a statistical thinker (/p/isis/citation/CBB012895736/)

Chapter Sober, Elliott; (2007)
Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology (/p/isis/citation/CBB000774728/)

Article Cramer, J. S.; (2004)
The Early Origins of the Logit Model (/p/isis/citation/CBB000501626/)

Article Alborn, Timothy L.; (2001)
Insurance against Germ Theory: Commerce and Conservatism in Late-Victorian Medicine (/p/isis/citation/CBB000100879/)

Article Nicholas W. Gillham; (2015)
The Battle Between the Biometricians and the Mendelians: How Sir Francis Galton’s Work Caused his Disciples to Reach Conflicting Conclusions About the Hereditary Mechanism (/p/isis/citation/CBB738872407/)

Article Charles H. Pence; (2022)
Of stirps and chromosomes: Generality through detail (/p/isis/citation/CBB367382199/)

Article Darrigol, Olivier; (2010)
James Maccullagh's Ether: An Optical Route to Maxwell's Equations? (/p/isis/citation/CBB001033632/)

Article Lukas M. Verburgt; (2024)
Scientific Method, Induction, and Probability: The Whewell–De Morgan Debate on Baconianism, 1830s–1850s (/p/isis/citation/CBB088934341/)

Book Cerrai, Paola; Freguglia, Paolo; Pellegrini, Claudio; (2002)
The Application of Mathematics to the Sciences of Nature: Critical Moments and Aspects (/p/isis/citation/CBB000201259/)

Book Cohen, I. Bernard; (2005)
The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (/p/isis/citation/CBB000550705/)

Essay Review Lavis, D. A.; Streater, R. F.; (2002)
Physics from Fisher Information (/p/isis/citation/CBB000201203/)

Chapter Porter, Theodore M.; (2002)
Models, Analogies, and Statistical Reason, 1760-1900 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000201994/)

Article Porter, Theodore M.; (2007)
Introduction (/p/isis/citation/CBB000773204/)

Article Canseco, Juan; (2006)
Conflitto e confronto: l'evoluzionismo materialista di Darwin e l'evoluzionismo spiritualista di Wallace (/p/isis/citation/CBB001221434/)

Article Georgijevsky, Aleksandr B.; (2009)
Charles Darwin---A Founder of the Evolutionary Anthropology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421103/)

Article Veuille, Michel; (2010)
Darwin and Sexual Selection: One Hundred Years of Misunderstanding (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211675/)

Article Bowler, Peter J.; (2014)
Francis Galton's Saltationism and the Ambiguities of Selection (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421642/)

Book Roe, Keith E.; (2007)
Theories on the Origin of Alternation; History of Conflict and Convergence (/p/isis/citation/CBB000760098/)