Modern epidemiology

Abstract

In his masterpiece The Growth of Biological Thought Ernest Mayr (1982) postulated that the change of the typological to populational thinking is the most important conceptual revolution in biology. This conjecture of Mayr was based on his interest in the evolution and variation of birds, and his observations of the variety within populations led him to conclude that it is individuality that is the chief characteristic within populations rather than any criterion of sameness (Childs, 1999). Variation, therefore, is the biological substrate upon which evolution by natural selection and other stochastic mechanism constructs life and humans beings are not exception. In typological thinking the type (the equivalent to the statistical mean in populational thinking) is real and the deviation from the type (the equivalent to the statistical variance in populational thinking) is an abstraction. In contrast, in population thinking the variance is real and the mean is an abstraction. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.