Weighing the Evidence

Science -- Mangel 306 (5701): 1478 -- Weighing the Evidence:

What constitutes data? what is evidence? how is evidence used to draw conclusions?

"The goal of The Nature of Scientific Evidence is to help answer those questions. To do so, Mark Taper (an ecologist at Montana State University) and Subhash Lele (a statistician at the University of Alberta) have drawn authors from the fields of ecology, statistics, and philosophy. The choice of ecology as the illustrative science is a good one, because ecology has strong traditions in both the discovery of new knowledge and the application of that knowledge to important problems of society. The chapters are grouped in five sections: 'Scientific Process'; 'Logics of Evidence'; 'Realities of Nature'; 'Science, Opinion, and Evidence'; and 'Models, Realities, and Evidence.' "