We study the Whitney numbers of the first kind of combinatorial geometries. The first part of the paper is devoted to general results relating the Möbius functions of nested atomistic lattices, extending some classical theorems in combinatorics. We then specialize our results to restriction geometries, i.e., to sublattices $\mathcal{L}(A)$ of the lattice of subspaces of an $\mathbb{F}_q$-linear space, say $X$, generated by a set of projective points $A \subseteq X$. In this context, we introduce the notion of subspace distribution, and show that partial knowledge of the latter is equivalent to partial knowledge of the Whitney numbers of $\mathcal{L}(A)$. This refines a classical result by Dowling. The most interesting applications of our results are to be seen in the theory of higher-weight Dowling lattices (HWDLs), to which we dovote the second and most substantive part of the paper. These combinatorial geometries were introduced by Dowling in 1971 in connection with fundamental problems in coding theory, and further studied, among others, by Zaslavsky, Bonin, Kung, Brini, and Games. To date, still very little is known about these lattices. In particular, the techniques to compute their Whitney numbers have not been discovered yet. In this paper, we bring forward the theory of HWDLs, computing their Whitney numbers for new infinite families of parameters. Moreover, we show that the second Whitney numbers of HWDLs are polynomials in the underlying field size $q$, whose coefficients are expressions involving the Bernoulli numbers. This reveals a new link between combinatorics, coding theory, and number theory. We also study the asymptotics of the Whitney numbers of HWDLs as the field size grows, giving upper bounds and exact estimates in some cases. In passing, we obtain new results on the density functions of error-correcting codes.