“Oh come now! I know you said “technical,” but statistics? Really?”
Indeed, dear reader. Much as we may wish it were not so, long gone are the days of natural history being written in elegant Victorian prose. Delve into any serious journal, examine any research touching upon the subject, and far from contemplating a tangled bank, you’ll instead be puzzling over various numbers, Greek letters, and assorted cryptic squiggles that to the uninitiated may have as well have been copied from the gold embroidery on a wizard’s pointy purple hat. If you’re going to pursue any studies in the field, lest you remain on the most genteel margins, an understanding – at least at a basic level – of statistics is required.
Fortunately, there are those, Therese M. Donovan and Ruth M. Mickey being two, who believe that the introduction of such arcane practices need not be traumatic; in fact, it can even be fun. This is exactly the approach they’ve taken in their recently published Bayesian Statistics for Beginners; a Step-by-Step Approach.
In brief, Bayesian statistics, the method increasingly popular among studies in the life sciences, is a “method of statistical inference in which Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.” Quite simply, it allows the estimation of probability for something you don’t yet know through the use of probabilities that you do – and when you find more reliable information, you incorporate it and as a result obtain a more reliable probability.
Unlike many other books taking up this, as well as similar subjects, the authors approach here is anything but stodgy. “Key to this book’s novel and informal perspective is its […] question and answer approach that utilizes accessible language, humor, plentiful illustrations, and frequent reference to on-line resources.” Because really, unless you’re studying to be a professional in one of the life sciences, or other scientific fields, your study of natural history is, at its heart, for your own enjoyment, so there’s no need to put yourself through something unpleasant in acquiring a new skill such as statistics when there is a method here at hand by which you can learn it every bit as well in a manner that is enjoyable and – yes, I’ll say it – fun.
