Researchers in ecology and evolution have long recognized the importance of understanding randomness in nature in order to distinguish the underlying pattern. Sir Francis Galton developed regression analysis to answer questions about heredity; Karl Pearson’s systems of distributions were motivated by the desire to fit evolutionary data on the size of crab claws. Fisher’s contributions from the fundamental theorem of evolution to fields of quantitative genetics, species abundance distributions and measurement of diversity are legendary. Studies on the geographic distribution of species led to the study of spatial statistics in ecology in the early part of the twentieth century. The classification and discrimination methods developed by Fisher and others for numerical taxonomy and community ecology are still commonly used in ecology.