Statistics and ecotoxicology: shotgun marriage or enduring partnership?

There are cultures in which people believe that some objects have magical powers; anthropologists call these objects fetishes. In our society, statistics are a sort of fetish. . Statistics direct our concern; they show us what we ought to worry about and how much we ought to worry. In a sense, the social problem becomes the statistic and, because we treat statistics as true and incontrovertible, they achieve a kind of fetishlike, magical control over how we view social problems. We think of statistics as facts that we discover, not numbers we create. (Best 2001)