Use R and work through the Sokal and Rohlf’s Biometry, 3rd edition. Create an R package for the datasets.
“There is remarkably little correlation between innate mathematical ability and capacity to understand the ordinary biometric methodologies. By contrast, in our experience a very high correlation exists between success in biometry course and success in the chosen field of biological specialization.”
“There are still a few legitimate fields of inquiry in which, from the nature of the phenomena studied, statistical investigation is unnecessary. When all animals given injections of a pathogenic organisms contract the disease, while none of the controls fall ill, statistical testing is hardly needed. Much more frequent, however, are investigations, such as those determining the relation betweens smoking and heart disease, where the variability of the outcomes necessitates statistical analysis.”
Twenty-five femur lengths of stem mothers of the aphid Pemphigus populitransversus in 0.1 mm.
Interorbital width of a 40 domestic pigeons (left) and the same data log10 transformed (right).
“The availability of computers relieves the tedium of computation, but not the necessity to understand the methods being employed.”
The subject matter in this chapter is fundamental to an understanding of all the subsequent chapters. It will provide methods to ask two common and fundamental questions that all biologists must answer frequently in their work: 1) how reliable are the results? 2) how probably is it that the differences between observed and expected are due to change alone?