Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
21 - The autonomy of statistical law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
London, 9 February 1877 The typical laws are those which most nearly express what takes place in nature generally; they may never be exactly correct in any one case, but at the same time they will always be approximately true and always serviceable for explanation …. They show us that natural selection does not act by carving out each new generation according to a definite pattern on a Procrustean bed, irrespective of waste. They also explain how small a contribution is made to future generations by those who deviate widely from the mean, either in excess or deficiency, and they enable us to discover the precise sources whence the deficiencies in the produce of exceptional types are supplied, and their relative contributions. We see by them that the ordinary genealogical course of a race consists in a constant outgrowth from its centre, a constant dying away at its margins, and a tendency of the scanty remnants of all exceptional members to revert to that mediocrity, whence the majority of their ancestors originally sprang.
The silly season in determinism had no bounds. ‘Given an hour of a man's life, and an anthropometric seraph could calculate all that he ever has been, and all that he ever will be.’ Thus, in 1871, did the social sciences emulate the Laplacian maxim of universal determinism. Laplace spoke of the lightest atom; in this sentence, the novelist speaks of a man. Laplace spoke of knowledge at an instant; the novelist speaks of measurements taken over an hour.
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- The Taming of Chance , pp. 180 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
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