Ronald Fisher

Template:Short description Template:For Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox scientist Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher Template:Post-nominals (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science"<ref name="Hald98" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics".<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> as his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Richard Dawkins declared Fisher to be the greatest of Darwin's successors.<ref name="Edwards pp. 421–430">Template:Cite journal</ref> He is also considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":3">Template:Cite journal</ref> According to statistician Jeffrey T. Leek, Fisher is the most influential scientist of all time based on the number of citations of his contributions.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years;<ref name=russ>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> there, he analyzed 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. Fisher also made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Fisher founded quantitative genetics,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and together with J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Fisher outlined Fisher's principle, the Fisherian runaway, the sexy son hypothesis theories of sexual selection, parental investment, and also pioneered linkage analysis and gene mapping.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> On the other hand, as the founder of modern statistics,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name=":2" /> Fisher made countless contributions, including creating the modern method of maximum likelihood and deriving the properties of maximum likelihood estimators,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> fiducial inference, the derivation of various sampling distributions, founding the principles of the design of experiments, and much more. Fisher's famous 1921 paper alone has been described as "arguably the most influential article" on mathematical statistics in the twentieth century, and equivalent to "Darwin on evolutionary biology, Gauss on number theory, Kolmogorov on probability, and Adam Smith on economics",<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and is credited with completely revolutionizing statistics.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Due to his influence and numerous fundamental contributions, he has been described as "the most original evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century" and as "the greatest statistician of all time".<ref>Template:Citation</ref> His work is further credited with later initiating the Human Genome Project.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Fisher also contributed to the understanding of human blood groups.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Fisher has also been praised as a pioneer of the Information Age.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> His work on a mathematical theory of information ran parallel to the work of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, though based on statistical theory.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> A concept to have come out of his work is that of Fisher information.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He also had ideas about social sciences,<ref name=":3" /> which have been described as a "foundation for evolutionary social sciences".<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

Fisher held strong views on race and eugenics, insisting on racial differences. Although he was clearly a eugenicist, there is some debate as to whether Fisher supported scientific racism (see Template:Section link). He was the Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London and editor of the Annals of Eugenics.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Early life and educationEdit

File:Ronald Fisher as a child.JPG

As a child

File:Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher - Inverforth House North End Way NW3.jpg

Inverforth House, North End Way NW3, where Fisher lived from 1896 to 1904. He is commemorated with a blue plaque.

Fisher was born in East Finchley in London, England, into a middle-class household; his father, George, was a successful partner in Robinson & Fisher, auctioneers and fine art dealers.<ref name="Heritage">Heritage: The Hampstead years of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher – most significant British statistician of the 20th century hamhigh.co.uk</ref> He was one of twins, with the other twin being still-born<ref>Fisher biography history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk</ref> and grew up the youngest, with three sisters and one brother.<ref>Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 8–16</ref> From 1896 until 1904 they lived at Inverforth House in London, where English Heritage installed a blue plaque in 2002, before moving to Streatham.<ref name="BluePlaque">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His mother, Kate, died from acute peritonitis when he was 14, and his father lost his business 18 months later.<ref name ="Heritage"/>

Lifelong poor eyesight caused his rejection by the British Army for World War I,<ref name="Wiley">Template:Cite encyclopedia.</ref> 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.<ref>The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, Supplement, 1911–1920</ref> In 1915 he published a paper, The evolution of sexual preference,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> on sexual selection and mate choice.

CareerEdit

During 1913–1919, Fisher worked as a statistician in the City of London and taught physics and maths at a sequence of public schools, at the Thames Nautical Training College, and at Bradfield College. There he settled with his new bride, Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters.<ref name=box>Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 35–50</ref>

In 1918 he published "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance", in which he introduced the term variance and proposed its formal analysis.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He put forward a genetics conceptual model showing that continuous variation amongst phenotypic traits measured by biostatisticians could be produced by the combined action of many discrete genes and thus be the result of Mendelian inheritance. This was the first step towards establishing population genetics and quantitative genetics, which demonstrated that natural selection could change allele frequencies in a population, reconciling its discontinuous nature with gradual evolution.<ref>Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 50–61</ref> Joan Box, Fisher's biographer and daughter, says that Fisher had resolved this problem already in 1911.<ref>R A Fisher: the life of a scientist Preface www-history.mcs.st-and.ac</ref> Today, Fisher's additive model is still regularly used in genome-wide association studies.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Rothamsted Experimental Station, 1919–1933Edit

In 1919, he began working at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in Hertfordshire, where he would remain for 14 years.<ref name=russ/> 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).<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Studies in Crop Variation II written with his first assistant, Winifred Mackenzie, became the model for later ANOVA work.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Later assistants who mastered and propagated Fisher's methods were Joseph Oscar Irwin, John Wishart and Frank Yates. Between 1912 and 1922 Fisher recommended, analysed (with heuristic proofs) and vastly popularized the maximum likelihood estimation method.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

File:Ronald Fisher 1912 graduation Cambridge.JPG

On graduating from Cambridge University, 1912

File:Peacock Flying.jpg

The peacock tail in flight, the classic example of a Fisherian runaway

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Rothamsted Research

Fisher's 1924 article On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics presented Pearson's chi-squared test and William Gosset's Student's t-distribution in the same framework as the Gaussian distribution, and is where he developed Fisher's z-distribution, a new statistical method commonly used decades later as the F-distribution. He pioneered the principles of the design of experiments and the statistics of small samples and the analysis of real data.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 1925 he published Statistical Methods for Research Workers, one of the 20th century's most influential books on statistical methods.<ref name=Conniffe>Template:Cite journal</ref> Fisher's method<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> is a technique for data fusion or "meta-analysis" (analysis of analyses). Fisher formalized and popularized use of the p-value in statistics, which plays a central role in his approach. Fisher proposes the level p=0.05, or a 1 in 20 chance of being exceeded by chance, as a limit for statistical significance, and applies this to a normal distribution (as a two-tailed test), yielding the rule of two standard deviations (on a normal distribution) for statistical significance.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The significance of 1.96, the approximate value of the 97.5 percentile point of the normal distribution used in probability and statistics, also originated in this book.

"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."<ref> Template:Cite book</ref>

In Table 1 of the work, he gave the more precise value 1.959964.<ref> Template:Cite book, Table 1</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>Sexual Selection and Summary of Population Genetics Accessed from uscs.edu 2 August 2015</ref>

One of Fisher's favourite aphorisms was "Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability."<ref>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.</ref>

Fisher's fame grew, and he began to travel and lecture widely. In 1931, he spent six weeks at the Statistical Laboratory at Iowa State College where he gave three lectures per week, and met many American statisticians, including George W. Snedecor. He returned there again in 1936.Template:Citation needed

University College London, 1933–1943Edit

In 1933, Fisher became the head of the Department of Eugenics at University College London.<ref>Department History, Department of Statistics, University College London.</ref> 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".<ref name=Conniffe/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>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</ref><ref>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."</ref>

The same year he also published a paper on fiducial inference<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and applied it to the Behrens–Fisher problem, the solution to which, proposed first by Walter Behrens and a few years later by Fisher, is the Behrens–Fisher distribution.

In 1936, he introduced the Iris flower data set as an example of discriminant analysis.<ref name="Fisher_DA_1936">Template:Cite journal</ref>

In his 1937 paper The wave of advance of advantageous genes he proposed Fisher's equation in the context of population dynamics to describe the spatial spread of an advantageous allele, and explored its travelling wave solutions.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Out of this also came the Fisher–Kolmogorov equation.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 1937, he visited the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, and its one part-time employee, P. C. Mahalanobis, often returning to encourage its development. He was the guest of honour at its 25th anniversary in 1957, when it had 2000 employees.<ref>Box, R. A. Fisher, p. 337</ref>

In 1938, Fisher and Frank Yates described the Fisher–Yates shuffle in their book Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research.<ref>Template:Cite book Note: the 6th edition, Template:Isbn, is available on the web, but gives a different shuffling algorithm by C. R. Rao.</ref> Their description of the algorithm used pencil and paper; a table of random numbers provided the randomness.

University of Cambridge, 1943–1956Edit

In 1943, along with A. S. Corbet and C. B. Williams he published a paper on relative species abundance where he developed the log series distribution (sometimes called the logarithmic distribution) to fit two different abundance data sets.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Volkov-et-al-2003">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Williams-1964">Template:Cite journal</ref> In the same year he took the Balfour Chair of Genetics where the Italian researcher Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was recruited in 1948, establishing a one-man unit of bacterial genetics.

In 1936, Fisher used a Pearson's chi-squared test to analyze Mendel's data and concluded that Mendel's results were far too perfect, suggesting that adjustments (intentional or unconscious) had been made to the data to make the observations fit the hypothesis.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Later authors have claimed Fisher's analysis was flawed, proposing various statistical and botanical explanations for Mendel's numbers.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1947, Fisher co-founded the journal Heredity with Cyril Darlington and in 1949 he published The Theory of Inbreeding.

In 1950, he published "Gene Frequencies in a Cline Determined by Selection and Diffusion".<ref name=":1">Template:Cite journal</ref> He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs,<ref>Box, R. A. Fisher, pp. 93–166</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Fisher publicly spoke out against the 1950 study showing that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, arguing that correlation does not imply causation.<ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref> 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."<ref name="frs">Template:Cite journal</ref> Others have suggested that his analysis was biased by professional conflicts and his own love of smoking;<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> he was a heavy pipe smoker.<ref name="Keane 2022"/>

He gave the 1953 Croonian lecture on population genetics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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.<ref>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.</ref> My efforts to understand this Fisher compromise led me to the likelihood principle".<ref>p. xvii in Ghosh (ed.)</ref>

Adelaide, 1957–1962Edit

File:Ronald Aylmer Fisher.jpg

Memorial plaque over his remains, lectern-side aisle of St Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide

In 1957, a retired Fisher emigrated to Australia, where he spent time as a senior research fellow at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Adelaide, South Australia.<ref name=samhs/> During this time, he continued in his denial of tobacco harm, and enlisted German eugenicist Otmar von Verschuer to his cause.<ref name="Keane 2022"/>

Following surgery for colon cancer, he died of post-operative complications in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide in 1962.<ref name=samhs>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Keane 2022"/> His remains are interred in St Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide.<ref name=samhs/>

LegacyEdit

Fisher's doctoral students included Walter Bodmer,<ref name=mathgene/> D. J. Finney, Ebenezer Laing,<ref name=GaltonInst2013/><ref name=mathgene/> Mary F. Lyon<ref name="zimmer"/> and C. R. Rao.<ref name=mathgene/> Although a prominent opponent of Bayesian statistics, Fisher was the first to use the term "Bayesian", in 1950.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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,<ref name=Clutton-Brock1991>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=Trivers1972>Template:Citation</ref>
File:Fisher-stainedglass-gonville-caius.jpg
Stained glass window (now removed) in the dining hall of Caius College, in Cambridge, commemorating Ronald Fisher and representing a Latin square, discussed by him in The Design of Experiments
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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."<ref name="Fisher">Fisher, R.A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Clarendon Press, Oxford</ref>
Fisher's geometric model, an evolutionary model of the effect sizes on fitness of spontaneous mutations proposed by Fisher to explain the distribution of effects of mutations that could contribute to adaptive evolution.<ref name=brief-history>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Heterozygote advantage<ref>Fisher R. A. 1930. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.</ref> 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<ref name="Fisher_DA_1936" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
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.<ref>B. R. Frieden, Science from Fisher Information, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2004.</ref>
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<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Fisher's permutation test
Fisher's inequality<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Sufficient statistic, when a statistic is sufficient with respect to a statistical model and its associated unknown parameter if "no other statistic that can be calculated from the same sample provides any additional information as to the value of the parameter".<ref name="Fisher1922">Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.<ref name="Fisher 1925 90–104">Template:Citation.</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The concept of an ancillary statistic and the notion (the ancillarity principle) that one should condition on ancillary statistics.

Personal life and beliefsEdit

File:Ronald Fisher with his sons.png

Ronald Fisher with his sons

Fisher married Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters.<ref name=box/> His marriage disintegrated during World War II, and his older son George, an aviator, was killed in combat.<ref>Box, R. A. Fisher, p. 396</ref> His daughter Joan, who wrote a biography of her father, married the statistician George E. P. Box.<ref>Box, Joan Fisher (1978) R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist Preface, Template:ISBN</ref>

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."<ref name="frs"/> Fisher was noted for being loyal, and was seen as a patriot, a member of the Church of England, politically conservative, as well as a scientific rationalist. He developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and was the archetype of the absent-minded professor. H. Allen Orr describes him in the Boston Review as a "deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines".<ref>Gould on God: Can religion and science be happily reconciled? bostonreview.net</ref> In a 1955 broadcast on Science and Christianity,<ref name="frs"/> 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.{{#if:|{{#if:|}}
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Fisher was involved with the Society for Psychical Research.<ref>Template:Cite book Template:Page needed</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Views on raceEdit

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).<ref name=UNESCO1952>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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:

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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".<ref name= UNESCO1952/>Template:Rp Muller's criticism was recorded in more detail and was noted to "represent an important trend of ideas":

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Fisher's own words were quoted as follows:

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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?<ref name="bodmer21">Template:Cite journal</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}
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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.<ref name="bodmer21" /> Fisher had a close personal relationship with Indian statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, and significantly contributed to the development of the Indian Statistical Institute; and Fisher's graduate students included Walter Bodmer, a child of Jewish-German parents who fled from Nazi Germany while he was young, and Ebenezer Laing, an African geneticist from Ghana.<ref name="bodmer21" /> Daniel Kevles, an American historian of science, described Fisher as an "anti-racist conservative".<ref name="bodmer21" /> However, British historian Richard J. Evans, writing in The New Statesman, argued that Fisher's views on eugenics and his opposition to UNESCO's statement about genetic racial differences were indicative of racism.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

EugenicsEdit

Template:Eugenics sidebar In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.

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.<ref name=Adelaide>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=NewScientist>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name=Cruz>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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 sterilisation. Fisher was against the idea of forced sterilisation.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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.<ref name="bodmer21" />

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."<ref name="bodmer21" /><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He conducted extensive correspondence with von Verschuer over decades, which is held at the University of Adelaide.<ref name="Keane 2022">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

RecognitionEdit

Appraisal of scientific meritsEdit

Fisher was elected to the Royal Society in 1929, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> the American Philosophical Society in 1941,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1948.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1950, Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler used the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator to solve a differential equation relating to gene frequencies in a paper by Ronald Fisher.<ref name=":1" /> This represents the first use of a computer for a problem in the field of biology. The Kent distribution (also known as the Fisher–Bingham distribution) was named after him and Christopher Bingham in 1982, while the Fisher kernel was named after Fisher in 1998.<ref>Tommi Jaakkola and David Haussler (1998), Exploiting Generative Models in Discriminative Classifiers. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11, pages 487–493. MIT Press. Template:Isbn PS, Citeseer</ref>

The R. A. Fisher Lectureship was a North American Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) annual lecture prize, established in 1963, until the name was changed to COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship in 2020. On 28 April 1998 a minor planet, 21451 Fisher, was named after him.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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",<ref name="Hald98">Template:Cite book p.738.</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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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.<ref name="Miller00">Miller, Geoffrey (2000). The Mating Mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, London: Heineman, Template:ISBN (also Doubleday, Template:ISBN) p.54.</ref>

Contentious views on eugenicsEdit

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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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."<ref name="bodmer21"/>

In June 2020, during the international protests caused by the murder of George Floyd, Gonville and Caius College announced that a 1989 stained-glass window commemorating Fisher's work would be removed because of his connection with eugenics.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> An accommodation building, built in 2018 and previously named after him, was subsequently renamed too.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> University College London also decided to remove his name from its Centre for Computational Biology.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>