Sir Ronald Fisher was a statistician and biologist well known for having authored several equations that are still used in the world of natural science research today.

While his life is extensively prolific, being the author of several articles and a great researcher, he is also known to be pro-eugenics and to reject the idea that all people, regardless of race, are equal.

Let’s see below a biography of Ronald Fisher , which is marked by chiaroscuro and some controversies.

Biography of Ronald Fisher

Next we will look at the life of Ronald Fisher, which is characterized by a long scientific career and statistical findings, as well as some controversy.

First years

Ronald Fisher was born in London, England, on February 17, 1890, into a middle-class family. Throughout his life, his vision was quite diminished , although it did not lead to blindness, but it also prevented him from being able to join the British army during the First World War.

At the age of fourteen he enrolled at Harrow School, where he won a medal for his excellent mathematical abilities . That is why in 1909 he earned the right to be accepted into Cambridge schools to expand his mathematical knowledge.

He later won the title in this science and was able to start working as a statesman.

Career and education

During the period between 1913 and 1919, Ronald Fisher worked in the City of London. There, in addition to working as a statesman, he taught physics and mathematics in public schools , including Thames Nautical Training College, and Bradfield College.

In 1918 he published one of the most popular and prestigious works: The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance .

In this paper he introduced the concept of variance and proposed the analysis of it by means of statistics , and in it some of the first ideas about population genetics are raised. In the text he demonstrated that natural selection can change the frequencies of the alleles of a certain gene in the population.

Years in Rothamsted

In 1919 he began work at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, where he would remain for a period of 14 years. There he analyzed a large amount of data on studies that had been carried out since 1840.

That same year he was offered a place at the Francis Galton Laboratory at the University of London, which at the time was headed by Karl Pearson. However, Fisher opted to take a temporary job in Rothamsted. It was during these years that he made the first application of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) .

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In his 1924 article called On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics he presented several statistical tests together, among them Pearson’s chi-square and William Gosset’s student t.

It is in this document that he introduces a new statistical method, which, decades later, would be known as the F of Fisher .

In 1931 he stayed for six weeks at the Statistical Laboratory in Iowa, where he gave several lectures and had the opportunity to meet several statesmen, including George W. Snedecor.

Years in London

In 1933, Fisher took over the leadership of the department of eugenics at University College London .

In 1935 he published The Design of Experiments , a book in which he argued how important it was to use statistical techniques to justify the methods in research.

In 1937 he published a paper, The wave of advance of advantageous genes , in which proposed an equation to explain the expansion of the advantageous alleles of a certain gene in the population. In that paper he introduced one of the most famous equations in statistics, the Fisher-Kolmogorov equation.

That same year he visited the Indian Institute of Statistics in Calcutta, where he had the opportunity to meet great minds in the discipline of the Indian subcontinent.

In 1938, together with Frank Yates, described the Fisher-Yates algorithm , a mathematical calculation whose original purpose was to serve in research in biology, medicine and agriculture.

Personal life

Ronald Fisher married Eileen Guinnes, with whom he had two sons and six daughters. The marriage broke up during World War II, when one of their sons was killed in combat.

Fisher was a follower of the Church of England and extremely conservative , but also a great scientist and defender of rationalism in research. In the academic world he was known for being the typical teacher who goes through the roof, who cares more about explaining the content of the lesson by digressing than anchoring himself to a strict class script. He was also known to attach little importance to his style of dress, dressing rather carelessly.

One of the things that call most attention to Fisher is that was part of the Society for Psychic Research , an organization that is in charge of investigating paranormal events, but from a more or less scientific perspective and trying to leave aside pseudoscientific and mythological interpretations of them.

Last years

In 1957, Fisher retired and decided to emigrate to Australia, where he was awarded a place as Researcher Emeritus at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Adelaide. It was in that same city that he died, on 29 July 1962.

Disputes

Although Fisher was a great scientist, he had a vision of how humanity should be organized based on eugenic and racist pretexts .

In 1910 he joined the British Eugenics Society at Cambridge University. Fisher considered eugenics to be a good method of dealing with social pressures.

In his book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection he explained that one of the reasons why great civilizations fell was because their most powerful classes, at some point in history, had been less fertile, making the lower classes, seen as inferior, carry more weight in society demographically speaking, which ultimately implied a greater socio-political weight for them.

In 1950 Fisher opposed the debate on race proposed by UNESCO, believing that there was strong evidence to support the idea that races were significantly different and that there should therefore be differences in the treatment of individuals within them.

Controversy with tobacco research

Fisher was openly critical of research conducted in 1950 linking tobacco smoking to cancer. The research specifically claimed that tobacco was behind the disease.

However, Fisher did not consider this statement to be correct, given that correlation does not imply causality , i.e., that two events occur more or less evenly does not necessarily imply that one causes the other. Some say that Fisher expressed this criticism because he was a heavy smoker and was also suspected of having been bribed by the tobacco industry to support it.

This is not true, however, since what I was doing was simply indicating that claiming that one factor, in this case tobacco smoking, was ultimately responsible for the other, in this case cancer, was not strictly true.

Although nowadays nobody doubts how harmful tobacco consumption is , an important lesson can be drawn from this anecdote: we should not believe that because two or more things happen at the same time, they are responsible for each other, something that many investigations and media fail to affirm without adequate evidence.

Bibliographic references:

  • Fisher-Box, J. (1978) Ronald Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, New York: Wiley, ISBN 0-471-09300-9
  • Salsburg, D. (2002) The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, ISBN 0-8050-7134-2.