6 ◾ Biological Computation
e Brownian motion example is not unusual. ere is a close link
between the development of statistics and the study of probabilistic (or
stochastic) processes and the pursuit of biological questions. One of the
reasons for this link was the endeavor to collect, tabulate, and analyze
human populations (e.g., conducting a census of a state’s population).
Adolf Quételet (1796–1874) collected and analyzed height and weight
data and was amazed to discover that their distribution was a normal dis-
tribution (a “bell curve”). Up to his time normal distributions were used
only to explain measuring errors, mainly of astronomical phenomena.
Some of Quetelet’s discoveries were that the height of French army recruits ...