Provost Lecture - Fred Bookstein: Biology and Mathematical Imagination: The Meaning of Morphometrics

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, the Rohlf Medal was created in Stony Brook Professor and morphometrics pioneer James Rohlf’s honor. On his 75th birthday, October 24, 2011, the first recipient of the award, Fred L. Bookstein, was honored and chosen to speak at a Provost’s Lecture. Morphometrics is a new specialty that combines techniques of geometry, computer science, and mathematical biology with multivariate statistics in tools for analysis of biological shape variation and shape difference. His innovations are being applied broadly today across evolutionary and developmental biology, paleontology, computer vision, medical imaging, and cognitive neuroimaging. Since 1977, Bookstein has produced more than 300 books, chapters, articles, and videotapes on various aspects of these methods and their applications in studies of normal and abnormal craniofacial growth in humans and other mammals, studies in the neuroanatomy of schizophrenia and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and evolutionary studies of hominids and other paleontological taxonomic groups. Thanking Stephen Jay Gould, Rohlf, and other scientists, Bookstein said, “I couldn’t have done this without 20 years of software support and funds from various foundations.“ He said the “take-home message“ is that images provide a special kind of data, harking back farther than the Renaissance and indeed to the drawings on cave walls such as Altamira, Chauvet, and Lascaux. He further traced the origins of morphometrics to the form of the Paleolithic sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, which exaggerated the form of the fertility figure. The birth of caricature was tied to morphometrics in a similar way, and Bookstein cited Honore Daumier’s drawings of the King of France as pear-shaped. “We can do this because we have done it since the Stone Age,“ he said. “What is needed is to turn this into a scientific tool. You can do this with hexagons or triangles instead of graph paper... we have a history of attaching shapes to statistics. We can read figures more easily than a table of numbers.“ Examples of this included portrayals of criminals to abet Scotland Yard and artist Paul Klee’s experimental art. Albrecht Durer used grids to understand human proportion. Bookstein’s own forensic work using morphometric techniques has been used in 15 death penalty cases in which the convicted murderer had an alcoholic mother with brain damage. “The jury came back with a sentence of life [in prison] instead of death,“ he said. In summary, Bookstein said that the morphometrician is better positioned than the statistician because he or she is aided with information about curvature and grids. In summary, he said it should become part of the “tool kit“ of biologists.