Why are descriptive statistics useful in biology?
Descriptive statistics, as opposed to hypothesis-testing, gives information about the central tendency and variability of biological data. It is also used to determine whether or not your data conforms to the assumptions necessary to use parametric statistics (one of these in normal distribution). In addition to plotting a histogram showing the distribution of your data, you can also calculate mean, median, mode, standard deviation, standard error of the mean, and variance of the data. There are also many other types of graphs that statisticians use to show their data, such as q-q norm plots, box plots and stem-and-leaf plots. Modern biologists cannot get anything published in journals without analyzing their data with statistics.
