"Science would pretty much be ok." Here the author takes a very limited view of science. Specifically, genetics, neuroscience, and parts of molecular biology a

"Science would pretty much be ok." Here the author takes a very limited view of science. Specifically, genetics, neuroscience, and parts of molecular biology are completely ignored in the discussion of statistics and medicine. Sure there is a fine line between methods which are purely statistics-based and methods which have elements of analysis in common with statistics-based methods, but I think the bottom line is that much of 20th century science has depended on statistics. Since the early days of genetics, methods used in statistics have been important to genetics basically going back as far as Mendel. Earlier neuroscience, especially in the 19th century, was not so much quantitative as it was qualitative, but in the past few decades we have seen an incredible surge in the usage of statistics in neuroscience. Statistics is also important in molecular biology, although not all the time and not always in an obvious way. Statistics techniques were important in learning about basic types of molecules in the early 20th century when it wasn't clear that DNA and RNA were the key components of genetic information storage and transmission; the events leading to the development of biostatistics basically paved the way to Watson and Crick's results on the structure of DNA. Likewise, such techniques have become commonplace in chemistry in an era of computational molecular modeling. So a world without statistics would have a very different type of science (a world in which Karl Popper would probably not be so upbeat about the state of scientific knowledge...).