The Million, Million, Million ... To One

Natural Selection Is Not Evolution.

Modern Statisticians Are Familiar With The Notion That Any Finite Body Of Data Contains Only A Limited Amount Of Information On Any Point Under Examination; That This Limit Is Set By The Nature Of The Data Themselves, And Cannot Be Increased By Any Amount Of Ingenuity Expended In Their Statistical Examination: That The Statistician's Task, In Fact, Is Limited To The Extraction Of The Whole Of The Available Information On Any Particular Issue.

If One In Twenty Does Not Seem High Enough Odds, We May, If We Prefer It, Draw The Line At One In Fifty (the 2 Per Cent. Point), Or One In A Hundred (the 1 Per Cent. Point). Personally, The Writer Prefers To Set A Low Standard Of Significance At The 5 Per Cent. Point, And Ignore Entirely All Results Which Fail To Reach This Level. A Scientific Fact Should Be Regarded As Experimentally Established Only If A Properly Designed Experiment Rarely Fails To Give This Level Of Significance.

We May Consequently State The Fundamental Theorem Of Natural Selection In The Form: The Rate Of Increase In Fitness Of Any Organism At Any Time Is Equal To Its Genetic Variance In Fitness At That Time.

The Statistician Cannot Evade The Responsibility For Understanding The Process He Applies Or Recommends.