Social Law and Natural Science
This chapter details how Adolphe Quetelet's work on error law provided the inspiration for the most important writers on statistical mathematics of the late nineteenth century. While Quetelet interpreted his discovery as confirmation that variation could be neglected in favor of the study of mean values, James Clerk Maxwell and Francis Galton, among others, saw in it a convenient and valuable tool for analyzing with mathematical precision the nature and effects of natural variation. The mathematics of variation was instrumental for the impressive achievements of the nineteenth-century kinetic theory. It also provided the key in biology to the quantitative study of heredity, leading eventually to what is now the most purely statistical of the natural sciences, quantitative genetics. Beyond its importance for particular natural and social sciences, however, the new understanding of the error law that derived from Quetelet's work proved essential for mathematical statistics itself.