Comments on “Spatial Statistics to Quantify Patterns of Herd Dispersion in a Savanna Herbivore Community”Introduction to Resource Ecology

Abstract

The famous statement Lies, damned lies, and statistics is attributed to Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881), British Prime Minister for the Conservative Party. When he made that pronouncement, he possibly referred to one of the original meanings of statistics, namely, the (quantitative) description of nation states. In the 19th century, the three developmental lines merged of what we now call ‘statistics’, that is to say, the quantitative description of societies, the study of sets of objects and the analysis of probabilities. Statistics became the quantitative investigation of equal elements or objects belonging to one set. At that time, two major ways to test hypotheses emerged; one was the experimental way (which became dominant in physics and chemistry) and the other was the statistical way, where a theory or hypothesis was confronted with observations (typical for biology and medicine). Finally, statistics developed into a powerful tool to discover underlying mechanisms that explain variation in patterns or processes.