Introductory Biological Statistics

A thorough grounding in statistics is necessary for a career in any experimental science, but many students find themselves intimidated by the subject. Hampton and Havel have written this text with these students in mind. While providing the theory and assumptions necessary for a deep understanding of statistics, they make it approachable and keep it relevant to the interests of biology students. Their examples and exercises show how to choose the appropriate statistical method for a particular hypothesis and how to execute that method using problems encountered by real-world biologists. The second edition has been ambitiously updated and reorganized, facilitating clearer connections between topics and improving clarity of those that are logically distinct. A wide range of descriptive and inferential methods is covered, including: normal, binomial, and Poisson frequency distributions; sampling distributions; one- and two-sample t-tests; the Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests; ANOVA; randomized block and factorial designs; correlations and regression analysis; and the chi-square test and other analyses of frequencies. The accompanying CD contains large data sets (in both ASCII and Excel formats), allowing students and instructors to save time and focus on concepts rather than data entry.