Ronald Fisher: biography of this English statistician

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

Although his life is extensively prolific, being the author of several articles and a great researcher, he is also he known for being in favor of eugenics and rejecting the idea that all people, whatever their race, are equal.

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

• Related article: "The 10 branches of Biology: its objectives and characteristics"

Biography of Ronald Fisher

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

early years

Ronald Fisher was born in London, England, on February 17, 1890, into a middle-class family. Throughout his life he had greatly diminished vision., although not reaching blindness, but it also prevented him from being part of the British army during the First World War.

fourteen years old he enrolled at Harrow School, at which he won a medal for excellent mathematical abilities. That is why in 1909 he won the power to be accepted in Cambridge schools to expand his mathematical knowledge.

Later he earned a degree in this science and was able to start working as a statesman.

Career and training

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

In 1918 he published one of the works that gave him the most popularity and prestige: The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance.

In this work he introduced the concept of variance and proposed its analysis through statistics, and it raises some of the first ideas on population genetics. In the text he showed that natural selection can change the frequencies of the alleles of a certain gene in the population.

Years at Rothamsted

In 1919 he began working 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 position in the Laboratorio de Francis Galton, at the University of London, which at that time was headed by Karl Pearson. However, Fisher opted to take a temporary job in Rothamsted. It was during these years that performed the first application of the analysis of variance (ANOVA).

In his 1924 article called On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics He presented several statistical tests together, among which Pearson's chi-square and William Gosset's student's t test can be highlighted.

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

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

Years in London

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

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

In 1937 he would publish a document, The wave of advance of advantageous genes, in which he proposed an equation to explain the expansion of advantageous alleles of a given 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 from the Indian subcontinent.

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

• You may be interested in: "Eugenics: what it is, types, and social implications"

Personal life

Ronald Fisher married Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters. The marriage broke up after World War II, a conflict in which one of his sons died while in combat.

Fisher he was a follower of the Church of England and extremely conservative in leaning, although also a great scientist and defender of rationalism in research. In academia, he was known for being the typical over-the-top professor who cares. more explaining about the content of the lesson by rambling instead of sticking to a strict script of the class. He was also known for giving little thought to his style of clothing, dressing rather sloppily.

One of the most striking things about Fisher is that He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research., an organization that is in charge of investigating paranormal events, but from a more or less less scientific and trying to put aside pseudoscientific and mythological interpretations of the themselves.

Last years

In 1957, Fisher retired and decided to emigrate to Australia, where he was granted a place as Research Fellow Emeritus at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Adelaide. It was in that same city where he died, on July 29, 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 the University of Cambridge. Fisher considered that eugenics was a good method to deal with social pressures.

in his book The Genetic 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, have a greater weight in society demographically speaking, which ultimately implied a greater sociopolitical weight for them.

In 1950 Fisher was opposed to the debate on the racial question proposed by UNESCO, believing that there was solid evidence to defend the idea that the breeds were significantly different and that, therefore, there must be differences in the treatment given to the individuals of the same.

Controversy with research on tobacco

Fisher was openly critical of research carried out in 1950 in which tobacco smoking was linked to cancer. The specific investigation ensured that tobacco was behind presenting the disease.

However, Fisher did not consider this statement to be correct, since correlation does not imply causation, that is, the fact that two events occur more or less evenly does not necessarily imply that one causes the other. Some say Fisher made this criticism because he was a chain smoker and was suspected of being bribed by the tobacco industry to support it.

However, this is not true, since what he was doing was simply indicating that affirming that a factor, in In this case, tobacco smoking was the most responsible for the other, in this case cancer, was not strictly TRUE.

Yes ok Today no one doubts how harmful tobacco use isYes, 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 the media fail to affirm without proof. suitable.

Bibliographic references:

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