Plant Science 156 (2000) 255
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Practical Statistics for Experimental Biologists — 2nd edition by A.C. Wardlaw. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1999. ISBN-0471988227; £18.99
The book written by Alastair C. Wardlaw is unusual in more than one aspect but it reflects fully its title: ‘Practical Statistics for Experimental Biol-ogists’ (2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0471-98821-9 and paperback: ISBN 0-471-98822-7). First, it is not the book you can read travelling, except if you carry at the same time a small computer. Indeed, the whole approach of the book is based on interactive learning by the reader. To do so, the author introduces all the main concepts useful in biological statistics by real-life examples and data that the reader is expected to process following guidelines. The author has chosen the statistics package MINITAB (http://
www.minitab.com) to help the reader bridge the gap between theory and practice. As the author puts it in the Preface: ‘‘It is therefore for those who want to go onto the computer screen straightaway and become familiar with the statistical methods that can be used there — and the basic ideas behind them’’. The drawback is that the book can be used as a reference manual only if you have first ploughed through it. Thus, the book is clearly not intended for those who are used to mathematics and formulae. However, the book offers an excel-lent introduction for those unfamiliar with statisti-cal jargon. In short, the book could form the core of a statistics course for students in biology, a field where intuitive understanding of the basic concepts in statistics is so primordial and a definite advan-tage.
The book is clearly written and builds up care-fully the statistical body mastered by the reader, sometimes in surprising or unexpected fashion. Each chapter is constructed in a similar way: a set of observations is used to illustrate one or several statistical procedures. A chapter ends with a short
and useful summary pointing to the next step. After the main text of some chapters, further notes are inserted. These are more than mere notes; they bring important background aspects that could not be brought conveniently by the ‘do first and under-stand afterwards’ approach used by the author. All the examples are treated with the package MINITAB with clear explanations and dialog boxes. Although only one package is used through-out, the author mentions at places the shortcom-ings of the package and discusses briefly others. The author knows all the pitfalls and difficulties linked to the teaching of statistics. Therefore, very pedagogically, he explains with great care funda-mentals and the meanings of key words. The comments on accuracy and precision, often used at random, are welcome. Later, the author reminds us first that it is impossible to prove that a null hypothesis (chance relationship) is correct and sec-ondly that correlation does not mean causation, two statements all too often forgotten. The exam-ples chosen in the text are biologically based. However, although the Poisson distribution is very useful when dealing with bacterial colony counts or radioactive disintegrations per second, the author points that it is unlikely to be valid for living organisms in their natural habitats. Indeed, the self-organizing, patterns of large populations units, like bird flocks or fish schools, with their emergent properties are part of complexity theory where exceptional events are not that rare. Overall a pleasant and useful book that can be put in every-one’s hands despite the dangerousness of the top-ics.
E. Westhof
UPR 9002 CNRS, IBMC,
15, rue Rene´ Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg, France
E-mail: [email protected]
.
