The books starts out by illustrating the power of numbers. Just by using very simple calculations, Cohen quickly arrives at the conclusion that the building of the ancient pyramids involved placing one giant block of stone in the structure, every two minutes. Since the weight of such stones is enormous, this required quite advanced techniques to achieve. Knowing the vast size of such an operation, this helps us to gain an understanding in how the Egyptians may have done it, and the level of technology available to them.

For long, people have been fascinated by numbers. Cohen’s description of the history of using numbers therefore starts with numerology. The reader is treated with lovely exercises is numerology: it is quite amazing how we can prove about anything, simply by reordering numbers that somehow correspond to letters. If only there was an empirical basis for such magic.

Off to more serious applications of numbers (by today’s standards), Cohen locates the proper start of using numbers in Hutcheson’s Moral Arithmetic. Hutcheson used formulae (and which are based on numbers) to make his claims about morality. Here, numbers were only used to illustrate a claim, but not much later people started to relate such numbers to observable phenomena. An example of this Benjamin Franklin, who used his mathematical genius to find arguments based on numbers for his political claims regarding the safety of inoculation against smallpox. He used numbers to show it was safe to have your children inoculated.

Many more examples are given of how claims were backed up with (increasingly advanced) numbers, and calculations based on these numbers. For instance, Alexandre Louis’s statistics showed the ineffectiveness of blood-letting in treating patients. Laplace used probability theory to suggest improvements to both the British and the French judicial system. Guerry was struck by the regularities he found in his tables on crime. Quetelet, referred to as the ‘powerhouse of the statistical movement’, introduced the ‘average man’. He explicitly started using statistics to gain an understanding of society. Quetelet is seen as the founder of statistically based sociology.

What did I learn

I think that the central claim of the book is that statistics became interesting when society became more complex. Especially in warfare, knowing how many troops one has, and can expect in the coming years, provides key insights in military strength. Unsurprisingly, the results of early censuses were highly confidential, not to give the opponents the benefit of the information. From a sociological perspective, this insight allows the rise of the use of statistics to be understood from an evolutionary perspective: the fundaments of societies change, and so does the way people think, as a result of that.

Florence Nightingale: the lady with the numbers

I was especially intrigued by Cohen spending a complete chapter on Florence Nightingale. As early readers of this blog may know, I used to be in the nursing profession myself, and was inspired by how she and her ideas was a strong force behind the movement towards a professional nursing practice. Of course, Nightingale has saved many lives during the Crimean Wars, ‘simply’ by improving sanitary and hygienic conditions in the war hospitals. Later, she improved these conditions in other hospitals, saving many more.

What I didn’t knwo about Nightingale, is that she greatly admired Quetelet. Cohen acclaims her not by inventing new statistics, but by using them appropriately in a time when such use was not common at all. By recording causes of death, Nightingale found that many soldiers died from infections, rather than war wounds. Also, using these records, she was able to show the results of the sanitary and hygienic changes she made. In that, she was a very early proponent of evidence based medicine.

Conclusion: Abrupt Ending

Unfortunately, the book seems to come to an abrupt ending after Florence Nightingale’s interest in statistics is described. As a result of this, only the distant history of statistics is dealt with in this book, whereas the introduction seems to hint at more recent developments in the use of numbers as well. Since the book was published after his death in 2003, I suspect that Cohen has been unable to finish his work. Despite this abrupt ending, however, I think the book is a very nice introduction to the history of using numbers, and provides an insightful overview of many of those in history who have contributed to the modern applications of statistics.

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This post is part of my ‘Reading List’. In this series I jot down some thoughts about the books I read and enjoyed. Some posts my give a somewhat balanced overview of a book, others will just focus on some aspects that, for whatever reason, caught my attention. Never are these posts meant as an evaluation or even review of the book. I just like to share some impressions.

An overview of my Reading List is available, which contains both a list of the books that I wrote about, and another list of books I’m planning to read.

Not strictly on social sciences, Stijn Ruiter discusses The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Especially the origin of (human) morality caught his interest. Dawkins quotes brain researcher Hauser, who “does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people […] the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.” That’s interesting – isn’t it – doing statistical investigations to morality? The way people responded to the moral tests given, did not correlate with their religion or religious beliefs. Dawkins builds upon this finding, by arguing that people do not require the existence of a God to be or become good: if the human body can do it for itself, no external force is required.

This line of reasoning reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago, about a Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel who wrote a book about near death experiences. This book was based on findings he published a few years earlier in the Lancet. In that publication, the occurrence of near death experiences during cardiac arrest is cross-tabulated with several variables, such as used medication, but more interesting also with the patients’ religion. Since it was shown that these variables did not relate to the occurrence of near death experiences, the article rejects many existing theories about the experience of an afterlife. Very interesting, but in the book this finding is extended to argue that since the body cannot sustain consciousness during cardiac arrest, the consciousness apparently exists independent of the body. In that, the line of reasoning is quite the opposite of the from Dawkins: since the human body cannot do it, it must lie outside the human. In my contribution I argue that these findings are quite likely to be due to lack of measurement accuracy.

Finally, a warm welcome to a new participant of this blog carnival. Bram Hengeveld discusses (in Dutch) quite some literature from a behavioristic school of research, which he elegantly applies to his own discipline: geriatric nursing. The behavioristic study is basically a replication of the classic Milgram experiments (the one in which participants were stressed to obey authority to administer electrical shocks to others, despite their (seeming) objections). Bram applies the findings from these kind of studies to his nursing profession. Interestingly, he does not focus on the patients (which probably could initiate some more posts), but on the nurses themselves. Most people working in health care, according to Bram, are not satisfied by the conditions under which they work and how these dictate (read: restrict) the level of care they can provide. However, as the experiments showed, in certain circumstances people readily seem to accept their situation and ‘go along’.

That’s it for today’s edition. I hope you’ll enjoy the posts gathered here, and please keep the new posts coming! Next edition will be on March 3rd.