Juvenile dinosaurs

by | Nov 19, 2019 | Latest News

 

This blog is mostly about Statistics as a science rather than statistics as numbers. But just occasionally the statistics themselves are so shocking, they’re worthy of a mention.

With this in mind I was struck by two statistics of a similar theme in the following tweet from Ben Goldacre (author of the Bad Science website and book):

 

Moreover, in the discussion following Ben’s tweet, someone linked to the following cartoon figure:

This shows that even if you change the way of measuring distance from time to either phylogenetic distance or physical similarity, the following holds: the distance between a sparrow and T-Rex is smaller than that between T-Rex and Stegosaurus.


Footnote 1: this is more than a joke. Recent research makes the case that there is a strong evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. As one of the authors writes:

We now understand the relationship between birds and dinosaurs that much better, and we can say that, when we look at birds, we are actually looking at juvenile dinosaurs.

Footnote 2. Continuing the series (also taken from the discussion of Ben’s tweet)… Cleopatra is closer in time to the construction of the space shuttle than the pyramids.

Footnote 3. Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Science, is a great read. It includes many examples of the way science – and Statistics – can be misused.

 

Stuart Coles

Stuart Coles

Author

I joined Smartodds in 2004, having previously been a lecturer of Statistics in universities in the UK and Italy. A famous quote about statistics is that “Statistics is the art of lying by means of figures”. In writing this blog I’m hoping to provide evidence that this is wrong.