ABSTRACT
Many scholars have argued (e.g., Cohen, 1987; Gigerenzer, 1987; Hacking, 1987) that a probabilistic revolution has occurred in our century. In this short period, the use of statistical methods has exploded from nonexistence to relative rarity to virtual ubiquity in the scientific literature. In the university, courses in probability and statistics are required for virtually all students in the natural and social sciences. Our daily newspapers are full of statistics about such matters as lung cancer risks, divorce rates, birth control failure rates, variation in temperature, the purity of soap, and so on. Beyond ubiquity, the disciplines of probability and statistics have fundamentally changed the way we think about science and the way we think about our world. Notions of randomness and uncertainty have opened up whole new areas of mathematics and science. This has released a ground swell of interest in subjects such as complexity, chaos, and artificial life.
