ABSTRACT
The main problem that statistics attempts to solve is the disentangling of the effects of different treatments from background variation due to a host of factors that we either cannot control or decide not to control because of the expense. We want to know how much reliance can be placed on the observed differences between the effects of various treatments. From some knowledge of the variability of the biological material, we want to estimate how likely it is that the differences we have observed between the treatments could have arisen because animals or plants have been subjected to one treatment compared to another. This brings us on to the idea of probability.
