3 - Statistical Science and the Invention of Heritability

Summary

Notwithstanding Galton’s admonition to count everything, counting is just a tool; it is no more science than hammering is architecture. One hundred years after Galton, Robert Hutchins remarked, contemptuously, that a social scientist is a person who counts telephone poles. The obvious way to turn counting into science is by conducting experiments, that is by manipulating nature and observing what the consequences are for whatever one is counting. Gregor Mendel, for example, was certainly a counter – he counted the mixtures of smooth and wrinkled peas in the progeny of the pea plants he intentionally crossed. What made Mendel’s work science was the intentional crossing of the plants, not the counting itself. It would have been much more difficult – perhaps impossible – to observe the segregation and independent assortment of traits by counting smooth and wrinkled peas in the wild.