Evolutionary Origins of Statisticians and Statistics

Statistics is basically mathematical, so the first question considered is why the human species can do mathematics as well as it can. Since the genetic composition of mankind cannot have changed much in the past ten or twenty thousand years, we have to explain man’s capacity for mathematics in terms of traits evolved for the needs of the hunter—gatherers of prehistory. An explanation is given in terms of the survival advantages of logical reasoning and symbolic thinking. The second question considered is why the mathematics that humans do in their minds works as well as it does when it is applied in the real world. It is suggested that the most likely explanation is that, at least to a good approximation, the world has the simple mathematical structure that it appears to have, and that man’s mind evolved by natural selection to mirror this structure. Since the relation between the mathematical models used in statistics and external reality is not essentially different from the relation between mathematics and reality in other branches of the natural sciences, it is not surprising that statistical theory works as well as it does in the real world. An attempt is made to apply Darwinian thinking to the cultural evolution of statistics. While the success of this is debatable, it is suggested that looking at the development of statistics from an evolutionary perspective helps to improve our understanding of some of the factors involved, at least to a modest degree.