Introduction: On the Absence of Geometry from Morphometrics

Abstract

Let me refer to the craft of measuring biological objects and phenomena as biometrics. In this century there have been three great methodological inventions indigenous to biometrics, not borrowed from outsiders. The analysis of variance, whose basic tenets Ronald Fishei laid down to make easier the task of inference from biological experiments, has been transmuted into a powerful generalization, the General Linear Model, and applied in virtually all fields of scholarship. It is now considered a proper branch of statistics, and its roots are lost sight of. Population genetics was formalized by Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, and others, beginning in the 1920s, as a mathematical framework for discussion of populations of genes changing over time. It has become entwined (in barbarized version) in the current debates over I.Q. and in the technique of path analysis lately popular in the social sciences. Quantitative phyletics is relatively new and not so much the creation of famous innovators. It has arisen to guide construction of the most crucial formalism in modern evolutionary theory, the cladogram or chart of evolutionary relationships, out of the chaos of contemporary and surviving data.