This is the first textbook of Virtual Anthropology, the new science that combines elements from fields as diverse as anthropology, medicine, statistics, computing, scientific visualization, and industrial design. The book is intended for students in any of these or nearby fields within biology, medicine, or engineering and for teachers, journalists, and all others who will enjoy the many examples from our real biological world. After a general introduction to the field and an overview, the book is organized around six themes conveyed in more than 300 pages of text accompanied by hundreds of carefully annotated images: medical imaging and 3D digitising techniques, electronic preparation of individual specimens, analysis of complex forms in space one or many at a time, reconstruction of forms that are partly missing or damaged, production of real objects from virtual models, and, finally, thoughts about data accessibility and sharing and the implications of all this for the future of anthropology. The authors' emphasis is not on technical details but rather on step-by-step explanations of the wealth of examples included here, from brain evolution to surgical planning, always in light of the relevance of these approaches to science and to society. All readers are encouraged to try out the techniques on their own using the tools and data included in the Online Extra Materials resource.

This book builds a much-needed bridge between biostatistics and organismal biology by linking the arithmetic of statistical studies of organismal form to the biological inferences that may follow from it. It incorporates a cascade of new explanations of regression, correlation, covariance analysis, and principal components analysis, before applying these techniques to an increasingly common data resource: the description of organismal forms by sets of landmark point configurations. For each data set, multiple analyses are interpreted and compared for insight into the relation between the arithmetic of the measurements and the rhetoric of the subsequent biological explanations. The text includes examples that range broadly over growth, evolution, and disease. For graduate students and researchers alike, this book offers a unique consideration of the scientific context surrounding the analysis of form in today's biosciences.

In Measuring and Reasoning, Fred L. Bookstein examines the way ordinary arithmetic and numerical patterns are translated into scientific understanding, showing how the process relies on two carefully managed forms of argument: * Abduction: the generation of new hypotheses to accord with findings that were surprising on previous hypotheses, and * Consilience: the confirmation of numerical pattern claims by analogous findings at other levels of measurement. These profound principles include an understanding of the role of arithmetic and, more importantly, of how numerical patterns found in one study can relate to numbers found in others. More than 200 figures and diagrams illuminate the text. The book can be read with profit by any student of the empirical nature or social sciences and by anyone concerned with how scientists persuade those of us who are not scientists why we should credit the most important claims about scientific facts or theories.

Morphometrics is the statistical study of biological shape and shape change. Its richest data are landmarks, points, such as the bridge of the nose, that have biological names as well as geometric locations. This book is the first systematic survey of morphometric methods for landmark data. The methods presented here combine conventional multivariate statistical analysis with themes from plane and solid geometry and from biomathematics to support biological insights into features of many different organs or organisms. The book begins with a review of the fundamentals of landmarks and a discussion of the thin-plate spline, a new, statistically tractable implementation of the old model of shape change as deformation. This is followed by a critical survey of conventional multivariate morphometrics (the use of interlandmark distances as separate variables). Coordinates for representing landmark configurations without reference to size are then introduced, and their multivariate statistics explored in full. The second half of the book is a survey of the most general and powerful new methods for describing the results of these analyses for both simple and complex landmark configurations. Using diagrams linked to biological interpretation, the text explains and interrelates the geometric features by which morphometric findings can be rendered legible. New tools are demonstrated using a variety of data sets from evolutionary biology, micropaleontology, neuroanatomy, and craniofacial growth.