How Quantification Persuades When It Persuades

Although Harry Woolf’s great collective volume Quantification (1961) mostly overlooked biology, Thomas Kuhn’s chapter there on the role of quantitative measurement within the physical sciences maps quite well onto the forms of reasoning that actually persuade us as biologists 50 years later. Kuhn distinguished between two contexts, that of producing quantitative anomalies (instead of “reasonable agreement” between data and theory) and that of resolving them. The implied form of reasoning is actually C. S. Peirce’s abduction or inference to the best explanation: “The surprising fact C is observed; but if A were true, C would be a matter of course; hence there is reason to suspect that A is true.” This article reviews abduction and the Kuhnian dichotomy in a range of classic examples where quantitative reasoning has ended arguments in the natural sciences. Included are John Snow’s discovery of the cause of cholera, Jean Perrin’s proof that atoms exist, the discovery of the double helix, the Alvarezes’ explanation of the extraterrestrial origin of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and current examples in passive smoking, ulcers, and the anthropogenicity of global warming. Modern biology is a quantitative science to the extent that we operate by “strong inference,” the insistence that our data are surprising on everybody else’s hypotheses but follow as a matter of course from our own, and that we demand numerical consilience whenever we infer across levels of analysis or across disciplines.