Computer programming in quantitative biology

One of the more striking developments in biology during the past fifty years has been the growth of quantitative and mathematical aspects of the subject (Bailey, 1967). Beginning with pioneers like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, the statistical analysis of biological data received a great impetus during the nineteen-twenties from the work of R. A. Fisher and others, whose researches were soon applied widely in agricultural experimentation and genetics. A steady increase in the diversity and power of the methods available and in their fields of application has, in the last fifteen years, been enormously accelerated by the development of electronic digital computers (Ledley, 1965; Stacey and Waxman, 1965; Sterling and Pollack, 1966). The result has been a rapid invasion of still further branches of biology by statistical, numerical and mathematical techniques. A catalogue of the fields now involved to some degree or another would cover virtually every branch of biology and it is therefore more useful to indicate the general nature of the advances resulting from the use of digital computers.