INTRODUCTION

In our century, the empire of chance has greatly expanded. R. A. Fisher called statistics “the peculiar aspect of human progress” that has given “to the twentieth century, its special character” (Fisher, 1954, p. 276), which is an exaggeration, but not an untruth. Descriptive statistics are featured in every issue of every newspaper, and mathematical statistics has become indispensable to public health and medical research, to marketing and quality control in business, to accounting, to economic and meteorological forecasting, to polling and surveys, to sports, to weapons research and development, and to insurance. For practitioners in many areas of the biological, social, and applied sciences, standardized procedures from inferential statistics virtually define the process of forming hypotheses, conducting experiments, and analyzing results that is taken to be “the scientific method.” Statistical tools fortified by assumptions of underlying probability distributions measure or, some would say, call into being entities such as IQ, economic indices, and attitude and opinion ratings. Business executives, nuclear safety experts, and weather forecasters are instructed in Bayesian probabilities to sharpen their intuitions. From the Earned Run Average to the probability of today's precipitation to the certification of a new drug for sale, statistics and probability are all-pervasive.