Ronald Fisher
Spouse | Ruth Eileen Guinness (1917) |
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Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Statistics, genetics, and evolutionary biology |
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Doctoral students |
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years;[14] there, he analysed its immense body of data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA). He established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician.
Together with
Fisher held strong views on
Early life and education
Fisher was born in
Lifelong poor eyesight caused his rejection by the British Army for World War I,[20] but also developed his ability to visualize problems in geometrical terms, not in writing mathematical solutions, or proofs. He entered Harrow School age 14 and won the school's Neeld Medal in mathematics. In 1909, he won a scholarship to study Mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1912, he gained a First in Mathematics.[21] In 1915 he published a paper The evolution of sexual preference[22] on sexual selection and mate choice.
Career
During 1913–1919, Fisher worked as a statistician in the City of London and taught
In 1918 he published "
Rothamsted Experimental Station, 1919–1933
In 1919, he began working at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in Hertfordshire, where he would remain for 14 years.[14] He had been offered a position at the Galton Laboratory in University College London led by Karl Pearson, but instead accepted a temporary role at Rothamsted to investigate the possibility of analysing the vast amount of crop data accumulated since 1842 from the "Classical Field Experiments". He analysed the data recorded over many years, and in 1921 published Studies in Crop Variation I, his first application of the analysis of variance (ANOVA).[28] Studies in Crop Variation II written with his first assistant, Winifred Mackenzie, became the model for later ANOVA work.[29] Later assistants who mastered and propagated Fisher's methods were Joseph Oscar Irwin John Wishart and Frank Yates. Between 1912 and 1922 Fisher recommended, analyzed (with heuristic proofs) and vastly popularized the maximum likelihood estimation method.[30]
Fisher's 1924 article On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics presented
In 1925 he published
"The value for which P = 0.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2 ; it is convenient to take this point as a limit in judging whether a deviation is to be considered significant or not."[35]
In Table 1 of the work, he gave the more precise value 1.959964.[36]
In 1928, Fisher was the first to use diffusion equations to attempt to calculate the distribution of allele frequencies and the estimation of genetic linkage by maximum likelihood methods among populations.[37]
In 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection was first published by Clarendon Press and is dedicated to Leonard Darwin. A core work of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis,[38] it helped define population genetics, which Fisher founded alongside Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane, and revived Darwin's neglected idea of sexual selection.[39]
One of Fisher's favourite aphorisms was "Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability."[40]
Fisher's fame grew, and he began to travel and lecture widely. In 1931, he spent six weeks at the Statistical Laboratory at
University College London, 1933–1943
In 1933, Fisher became the head of the Department of Eugenics at University College London.[41] In 1934, he become editor of the Annals of Eugenics (now called Annals of Human Genetics).
In 1935, he published The Design of Experiments, which was "also fundamental, [and promoted] statistical technique and application... The mathematical justification of the methods was not stressed and proofs were often barely sketched or omitted altogether .... [This] led H.B. Mann to fill the gaps with a rigorous mathematical treatment".[31][42] In this book Fisher also outlined the Lady tasting tea, now a famous design of a statistical randomized experiment which uses Fisher's exact test and is the original exposition of Fisher's notion of a null hypothesis.[43][44]
The same year he also published a paper on
In 1936, he introduced the
In his 1937 paper The wave of advance of advantageous genes he proposed
In 1938, Fisher and Frank Yates described the Fisher–Yates shuffle in their book Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research.[51] Their description of the algorithm used pencil and paper; a table of random numbers provided the randomness.
University of Cambridge, 1943–1956
In 1943, along with
In 1936, Fisher used a
In 1950, he published "Gene Frequencies in a Cline Determined by Selection and Diffusion".[58] He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs,[59] with various editions and translations, becoming a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines. In ecological genetics he and E. B. Ford showed that the force of natural selection was much stronger than had been assumed, with many ecogenetic situations (such as polymorphism) being maintained by the force of selection.
During this time he also worked on mouse chromosome mapping, breeding the mice in laboratories in his own house.[60]
Fisher publicly spoke out against the 1950 study showing that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, arguing that correlation does not imply causation.[61][62][63][64][65][66] To quote his biographers Yates and Mather, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."[5] Others have suggested that his analysis was biased by professional conflicts and his own love of smoking;[67] he was a heavy pipe smoker.[68]
He gave the 1953
In the winter of 1954–1955 Fisher met Debabrata Basu, the Indian statistician who wrote in 1988, "With his reference set argument, Sir Ronald was trying to find a via media between the two poles of Statistics – Berkeley and Bayes.[70] My efforts to understand this Fisher compromise led me to the likelihood principle".[71]
Adelaide, 1957–1962
In 1957, a retired Fisher emigrated to Australia, where he spent time as a senior research fellow at the Australian
Following surgery for
Legacy
Fisher's doctoral students included Walter Bodmer,[2] D. J. Finney, Ebenezer Laing,[3][2] Mary F. Lyon[4] and C. R. Rao.[2] Although a prominent opponent of Bayesian statistics, Fisher was the first to use the term "Bayesian", in 1950.[73] The 1930 The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is commonly cited in biology books, and outlines many important concepts, such as:
- Parental investment, is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc.) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness,[74][75]
- Fisherian runaway, explaining how the desire for a phenotypic trait in one sex combined with the trait in the other sex (for example a peacock's tail) creates a runaway evolutionary extremizing of the trait.
- Fisher's principle, which explains why the sex ratio is mostly 1:1 in nature.
- Reproductive value which implies that sexually reproductive value measures the contribution of an individual of a given age to the future growth of the population.[76][77]
- Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, which states that "the rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time."[78]
- adaptive evolution.[79]
- Sexy son hypothesis, which hypothesizes that females may choose arbitrarily attractive male mates simply because they are attractive, thus increasing the attractiveness of their sons who attract more mates of their own. This is in contrast to theories of female mate choice based on the assumption that females choose attractive males because the attractive traits are markers of male viability.[80]
- Mimicry, a similarity of one species to another that protects one or both.
- The evolution of dominance, a relationship between alleles of one gene, in which the effect on phenotype of one allele masks the contribution of a second allele at the same locus.[81]
- Heterozygote advantage[82] which was later found to play a frequent role in genetic polymorphism.
- Demonstrating that the probability of a mutation increasing the fitness of an organism decreases proportionately with the magnitude of the mutation and that larger populations carry more variation so that they have a greater chance of survival.
Fisher is also known for:
- Linear discriminant analysis is a generalization of Fisher's linear discriminant[47][83]
- Fisher information, see also scoring algorithm also known as Fisher's scoring, and Minimum Fisher information, a variational principle which, when applied with the proper constraints needed to reproduce empirically known expectation values, determines the best probability distribution that characterizes the system.[84]
- F-distribution, arises frequently as the null distribution of a test statistic, most notably in the analysis of variance
- Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem: Fisher's contribution to this was made in 1927
- Fisher–Tippett distribution
- Fisher–Yates shuffle algorithm
- Von Mises–Fisher distribution[85]
- Inverse probability, a term Fisher used in 1922, referring to "the fundamental paradox of inverse probability" as the source of the confusion between statistical terms which refer to the true value to be estimated, with the actual value arrived at by estimation, which is subject to error.[86]
- Fisher's permutation test
- Fisher's inequality[87]
- sample provides any additional information as to the value of the parameter".[88]
- Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution, a generalization of the hypergeometric distribution, where sampling probabilities are modified by weight factors.
- Student's t-distribution, widely used in statistics.[89][90]
- The concept of an ancillary statistic and the notion (the ancillarity principle) that one should condition on ancillary statistics.
Personal life and beliefs
Fisher married Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters.[23] His marriage disintegrated during
According to Yates and Mather, "His large family, in particular, reared in conditions of great financial stringency, was a personal expression of his genetic and evolutionary convictions." he said:
The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned.
Fisher was involved with the Society for Psychical Research.[94][95]
Views on race
Between 1950 and 1951, Fisher, along with other leading geneticists and anthropologists of his time, was asked to comment on a statement that UNESCO was preparing on the nature of race and racial differences, which was published in 1950 as the UNESCO Statement on Race. The statement, along with the comments and criticisms of a large number of scientists including Fisher, is published in "The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry" (1952).[96]
Fisher was one of four scientists who opposed the statement. In his own words, Fisher's opposition is based on "one fundamental objection to the Statement", which "destroys the very spirit of the whole document." He believes that human groups differ profoundly "in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development" and concludes from this that the "practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, and that this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist."[97][98][99]
Fisher's opinions are clarified by his more detailed comments on Section 5 of the statement, which are concerned with psychological and mental differences between the races. Section 5 concludes as follows:
Scientifically, however, we realized that any common psychological attribute is more likely to be due to a common historical and social background, and that such attributes may obscure the fact that, within different populations consisting of many human types, one will find approximately the same range of temperament and intelligence.[96]: 14
Of the entire statement, Section 5 recorded the most dissenting viewpoints. It was recorded that "Fisher's attitude … is the same as Muller's and Sturtevant's".[96]: 56 Muller's criticism was recorded in more detail and was noted to "represent an important trend of ideas":
I quite agree with the chief intention of the article as a whole, which, I take it, is to bring out the relative unimportance of such genetic mental differences between races as may exist, in contrast to the importance of the mental differences (between individuals as well as between nations) caused by tradition, training and other aspects of the environment. However, in view of the admitted existence of some physically expressed hereditary differences of a conspicuous nature, between the averages or the medians of the races, it would be strange if there were not also some hereditary differences affecting the mental characteristics which develop in a given environment, between these averages or medians. At the same time, these mental differences might usually be unimportant in comparison with those between individuals of the same race…. To the great majority of geneticists it seems absurd to suppose that psychological characteristics are subject to entirely different laws of heredity or development than other biological characteristics. Even though the former characteristics are far more influenced than the latter by environment, in the form of past experiences, they must have a highly complex genetic basis.[96]: 52
Fisher's own words were quoted as follows:
As you ask for remarks and suggestions, there is one that occurs to me, unfortunately of a somewhat fundamental nature, namely that the Statement as it stands appears to draw a distinction between the body and mind of men, which must, I think, prove untenable. It appears to me unmistakable that gene differences which influence the growth or physiological development of an organism will ordinarily pari passu influence the congenital inclinations and capacities of the mind. In fact, I should say that, to vary conclusion (2) on page 5, 'Available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,' seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes.[96]: 56
Fisher also ended a 1954 letter to Reginald Ruggles Gates, a Canadian-born geneticist who argued that different racial groups were different species, with the words:
I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?[100]
Fisher's writings nearly all discuss human populations or humanity as a whole without reference to race or specific racial groups, and none of his work explicitly supports the idea of racial superiority or white supremacy.
Eugenics
In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included
The last third of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection focused on eugenics, attributing the fall of civilizations to the fertility of their upper classes being diminished, and used British 1911 census data to show an inverse relationship between fertility and social class, which was partly due, he claimed, to the lower financial costs and hence increasing social status of families with fewer children. He proposed the abolition of extra allowances to large families, with the allowances proportional to the earnings of the father.[103][104][105] He served in several official committees to promote eugenics, including the Committee for Legalizing Eugenic Sterilization which drafted legislation aiming to limit the fertility of "feeble minded high-grade defectives ... comprising a tenth of the total population". It was proposed that this policy would allow for voluntary sterlization and Fisher was against the idea of forced sterilisation.[106][107]
Beginning in 1934, Fisher became disillusioned with the Eugenics Society over concerns that its activities were increasingly aimed in a political rather than scientific direction; he formally dissociated with the Society in 1941.[100]
Fisher wrote a testimony on behalf of the eugenicist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. He wrote that, although the Nazis used Verschuer's work to give scientific support for their ideology, it was "[Verschuer's] misfortune rather than his fault that racial theory was a part of the Nazi ideology."[100][108] He conducted extensive correspondence with von Verschuer over decades, which is held at the University of Adelaide.[68]
Recognition
Appraisal of scientific merits
Fisher was elected to the Royal Society in 1929, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934,[109] the American Philosophical Society in 1941,[110] and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1948.[111] He was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 and awarded the Linnean Society of London Darwin–Wallace Medal in 1958.
He won the Copley Medal and the Royal Medal. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 in Toronto and in 1928 in Bologna.[112]
In 1950,
The
In 2010, the R.A. Fisher Chair in Statistical Genetics was established in University College London to recognise Fisher's extraordinary contributions to both statistics and genetics.
Anders Hald called Fisher "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science",[7] while Richard Dawkins named him "the greatest biologist since Darwin":
Not only was he the most original and constructive of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Fisher also was the father of modern statistics and experimental design. He therefore could be said to have provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology's central theorem.[115]
Geoffrey Miller said of him:
To biologists, he was an architect of the "modern synthesis" that used mathematical models to integrate Mendelian genetics with Darwin's selection theories. To psychologists, Fisher was the inventor of various statistical tests that are still supposed to be used whenever possible in psychology journals. To farmers, Fisher was the founder of experimental agricultural research, saving millions from starvation through rational crop breeding programs.[116]
Contentious views on eugenics
Fisher and Sewall Wright both contributed to the development of population genetics, which became part of the modern synthesis. The interpretation of the mathematical theories of population genetics became a bone of contention between Fisher and Wright by the mid-1920s, and the issue became acrimonious. Dispute persisted for the rest of Fisher's life.[117] A 2021 paper, authored by trustees of the "Fisher Memorial Trust", commented that recent criticism of Fisher could mostly be characterised as "reconsideration of the honour given to individuals from preceding times who are felt to have contributed to social injustice in the past, or to have held views that are felt to have promoted social injustice."[100]
In June 2020, shortly following the death of George Floyd and the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, Gonville and Caius College announced that a 1989 stained-glass window commemorating Fisher's work would be removed because of his connection with eugenics.[118] In the same month, Rothamsted Research released a statement condemning Fisher's involvement with eugenics, stating "Rothamsted Research and the Lawes Agricultural Trust reject utterly the use of pseudo-scientific arguments to support racist or discriminatory views". An accommodation building, built in 2018 and previously named after him, was subsequently renamed.[119] University College London also decided to remove his name from its Centre for Computational Biology.[120]
Contentious views on smoking
Fisher rejected the notion of smoking cigarettes being dangerous, calling it "propaganda".[121]
Bibliography
References
Citations
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- ^ a b c d e f Ronald Fisher at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ a b Newport, Melanie (2013). "African Society of Human Genetics 8th Scientific Meeting held in conjunction with the H3Africa Consortium, May 19th-21st 2013, Accra, Ghana" (PDF). The Galton Institute Newsletter (80): 7–8.
- ^ ISBN 978-1101984604.
- ^ .
- ^ "Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher". Encyclopaedia Britannica. 25 July 2023.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-471-17912-2. p.738.
- ^ "Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962)". UCL Division of Biosciences. 2 March 2021. Retrieved 12 October 2023.
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- ISBN 978-0393351491.
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- ^ a b Russell, E. John Russell. "Sir Ronald Fisher". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. Retrieved 23 August 2017.
- ^ UCL (13 February 2019). "Ronald A Fisher". UCL Division of Biosciences. Retrieved 12 March 2021.
- ^ a b Heritage: The Hampstead years of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher – most significant British statistician of the 20th century hamhigh.co.uk
- ^ Fisher biography history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk
- ^ Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 8–16
- ^ Aldrich, John. "A Blue Plaque for Ronald Fisher's Childhood Home". Economics, Soton University. Soton.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 28 June 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2023.
- ISBN 978-0470849071..
- ^ The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, Supplement, 1911–1920
- PMID 21259607.
- ^ a b Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 35–50
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- ^ Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 50–61
- ^ R A Fisher: the life of a scientist Preface www-history.mcs.st-and.ac
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- ^ ProQuest 911976618.
- ISBN 978-0-05-002170-5.
- JSTOR 2681650.
- ^ Dallal, Gerard E. (2012). The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice.
- ^
Fisher, Ronald (1925). Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-05-002170-5.
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Fisher, Ronald (1925). ISBN 978-0-05-002170-5., Table 1
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- ^ Sexual Selection and Summary of Population Genetics Accessed from uscs.edu 2 August 2015
- ^ The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. It was first reported in 1936 by Julian Huxley and often repeated in Huxley's work (e.g., 1942, 1954) until it finally passed into the language unattributed through the writings of C. H. Waddington, Gavin de Beer, Ernst Mayr, and Richard Dawkins.
- ^ Department History, Department of Statistics, University College London.
- MR 0032177.
- ^ Fisher, R. A. (1971) The Design of Experiments. Chapter II. The Principles of Experimentation, Illustrated by a Psycho-physical Experiment, Section 8. The Null Hypothesis
- ^ OED quote: 1935 R. A. Fisher, The Design of Experiments ii. 19, "We may speak of this hypothesis as the 'null hypothesis'...the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation."
- hdl:2440/15222.
- ^ "R. A. Fisher's Fiducial Argument and Bayes' Theorem by Teddy Seidenfeld" (PDF).
- ^ hdl:2440/15227.
- ^ Fisher, R. A. (1937). "The wave of advance of advantageous genes". Annals of Eugenics (7): 353–369.
- ^ "Fisher 2" (PDF).
- ^ Box, R. A. Fisher, p. 337
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- ISBN 978-0-87969-607-8.
- ^ PMID 14791572.
- ^ Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 93–166
- PMID 15342495.
- PMC 1961712
- PMC 1961712
- ^ Fisher, Ronald (1958), "Cigarettes, Cancer, and Statistics" (PDF), The Centennial Review of Arts & Science, 2, East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press: 151–166
- ^ Fisher, Ronald (1958), "The Nature of Probability" (PDF), The Centennial Review of Arts & Science, 2, East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press: 261–274
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- ^ a b c d Keane, Daniel (31 August 2022). "Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer's correspondence with British biologist illuminates corruption of medicine". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 30 August 2022.
- S2CID 85157766.
- ^ The term "Berkeley" has several meanings, here. Basu refers to the leadership of Jerzy Neyman's department of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley in the world of frequentist statistics. Secondly, Basu alludes to the British philosopher George Berkeley who criticized the use of infinitesimals in mathematical analysis; Berkeley's criticisms were answered by Thomas Bayes in a pamphlet.
- ^ p. xvii in Ghosh (ed.)
- ^ a b c "Ronald Aylmer Fisher". South Australian Medical Heritage Society Inc.
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- ^ Clutton-Brock, T.H. (1991). The Evolution of Parental Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press. p. 9.
- ISBN 978-0-435-62157-5
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- Fisher, R.A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Clarendon Press, Oxford
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- ^ "dominance". Oxford Dictionaries Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
- ^ Fisher R. A. 1930. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
- MR 1190469.
- ^ B. R. Frieden, Science from Fisher Information, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2004.
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- ^ Fisher, R. A. (1922). "On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics". Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A. 222A: 309–368.
- hdl:2440/15239.
- JSTOR 91208.
- ^ Fisher, R. A. (1925), "Applications of "Student's" distribution" (PDF), Metron, 5: 90–104.
- ISBN 978-81-7758-404-2.
- ^ Box, R. A. Fisher, p. 396
- ISBN 0-471-09300-9
- ^ Gould on God: Can religion and science be happily reconciled? bostonreview.net
- ISBN 978-1594774997.[page needed]
- ^ "(Research with Ronald Fisher)". Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 44 (738). Society for Psychical Research: 392. 1967.
The targets (one-figure numbers and letters of the alphabet) were pasted on the backs of visiting cards, which were put into random order either by shuffling or by the use of random number tables loaned us by Professor Sir Ronald Fisher.
- ^ a b c d e "The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry" (PDF). UNESCO. 1952.
- ISBN 978-3634000714.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ISBN 978-1786076236.
- ISBN 978-0190686369.
- ^ PMID 33452466.
- ^ Evans, Richard J. (28 July 2020). "RA Fisher and the science of hatred". New Statesman. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
- ISBN 978-0-471-09300-8.
- ^ "Series 12. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) Statistician and geneticist. Papers 1911–2005. Papers on Eugenics. 1911–1920, 1936". University of Adelaide. Retrieved 7 September 2017.
- ^ Norton, Bernard (27 April 1978). "A 'fashionable fallacy' defended". New Scientist.
Fisher worked as he did because he was an ardent eugenist. (original italics) ... Careful study of Fisher's writings, moreover, enables one to establish strong connections between the problems that Fisher faced qua eugenist and the work in genetics outlined above.
- .
- PMID 21259955.
Amemorandum was accordingly circulated to the Council signed by Dr. R.A. Fisher, Professor Huxley, Dr. J.A. Ryle, Mr. E.J. Lidbetter, and myself, asking for authorization to form a sub-committee, the aim of which would be to secure the legalization of eugenics sterilization. The memorandum was unanimously approved by the Council, and in this way the nucleus of the existing Committee for Legalizing Eugenic Sterilization was formed.
- PMC 2531824.
- S2CID 28148032.
- ^ "Ronald Aymler Fisher". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 9 February 2023. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
- ^ "Ronald A. Fisher". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
- hdl:2440/15197.
- ^ "JPL Small-Body Database Browser". ssd.jpl.nasa.gov.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (2010). "Who is the Greatest Biologist Since Darwin? Why?".
Who is the greatest biologist since Darwin? That's far less obvious, and no doubt many good candidates will be put forward. My own nominee would be Ronald Fisher. Not only was he the most original and constructive of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Fisher also was the father of modern statistics and experimental design. He therefore could be said to have provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology's central theorem.
- ISBN 0-385-49516-1) p.54.
- ISBN 978-1-139-82762-1.
- ^ Busby, Mattha (27 June 2020). "Cambridge college to remove window commemorating eugenicist". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 June 2020.
- ^ "Statement on R A Fisher". Rothamsted Research. 9 June 2020. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
- ^ Adams, Richard (7 January 2021). "University College London apologises for role in promoting eugenics". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
- PMID 13577916.
Sources
- Box, Joan Fisher (1978). R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-09300-8.
- Howie, David (2002). Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press.
- JSTOR 2287199.
- Salsburg, David (2002). The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. ISBN 978-0-8050-7134-4.
Further reading
- Aldrich, John (1997). "R.A. Fisher and the making of maximum likelihood 1912–1922". .
- ISBN 9781461260790.
- .
- .
- Fisher in the 21st Century – conference at Gonville & Caius College, April 2022
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Ronald Fisher", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- A Guide to R. A. Fisher by John Aldrich
- University of Adelaide Library for bibliography, biography, 2 volumes of correspondence and many articles
- Classics in the History of Psychology for the first edition of Statistical Methods for Research Workers
- A collection of Fisher quotations compiled by A. W. F. Edwards