Life and achievements
Early life
Ronald Aylmer Fisher was born in 1890 in a family of five children in East Finchley, London. His childhood can be described as having a very sad start because his mother died when he was 14 years old. Fisher was almost blind from early childhood but showed extraordinary mathematical abilities, which he enhanced at Harrow School; he received the Neeld Medal for mathematics. He then proceeded to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained first-class honors in mathematics in 1912.
After university, Fisher got involved in several jobs, including teaching and working as a statistician in London. During World War I, he could not join the British Army because of his poor eyesight, which might have helped him shift his attention towards statistics and genetics. His academic activities during this period led to his paper of 1918, “On the probable errors of frequency distributions,” where he introduced the concept of variance and the birth of modern genetics.
Fisher married Eileen Guinness in 1917, and the couple had eight children. Financial problems also affected the growth of Fisher’s large family, which reflected his belief in genetics and population growth, which he explored in his subsequent work on eugenics and reproductive models.
Legacy
Ronald Fisher’s legacy is twofold: on the one hand, he is regarded as one of the most prominent statisticians and geneticists of the twentieth century; on the other, he is viewed as a supporter of eugenics. Fisher’s work on the analysis of variance and the method of maximum likelihood is fundamental to contemporary scientific inquiry. In the field of population genetics, he was instrumental in developing the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory together with J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright and reconciling Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics.
Fisher’s contributions to experimental design revolutionized the scientific method and set out guidelines that are still key to experimental practice and data analysis. He contributed to agriculture, medicine, psychology, economics, and biology. However, his advocacy of eugenics, his rejection of the 1950 UNESCO statement on race, and his views on smoking and lung cancer are still considered highly questionable.
Nonetheless, Fisher’s scientific accomplishments remain relevant to both theoretical and applied sciences even today. His work was a form of critique of genetics research, and it included areas such as genomics. Most of the theories and statistical approaches he introduced are still in use in research laboratories and industries across the globe, and this will continue for many generations to come.
Milestone moments
Jun 14, 1918
Fisher’s First Major Paper on Mendelian Inheritance
It was in 1918 that Ronald Fisher presented his work on “The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,” a paper that sought to solve one of the significant issues that arose when trying to integrate Mendelian genetics into population genetics.
Before this, genetics and evolutionary biology fields conflicted, with biologists such as Karl Pearson supporting a biometric methodology based on measuring the variation of a continuous character and the Mendelian geneticists who concentrated on the discrete characters.
Fisher’s paper then supplied the statistical model required to reconcile these two antithetical positions. Fisher defined variance, which quantifies how many individuals deviate from the population’s mean.
He showed that blending characters like height or skin color could be obtained by accumulating multiple genes, each of which obeyed Mendel’s laws.
This statistical vision helped put an end to the controversy between biometricians and Mendelians, as it demonstrated that minor genetic variations could sum up to produce the variation range observed in nature.
Fisher’s 1918 paper opened the door for subsequent developments in quantitative genetics, such as GWAS and the identification of genetic loci.
Mar 13, 1930
Publication of Statistical Methods for Research Workers
In 1925, Fisher published Statistical Methods for Research Workers, which laid new foundations for experiment analysis.
This work formalized the statistical methods he had used at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, such as ANOVA and the application of randomization in experimentation.
Statistical Methods for Research Workers was transformed into a definitive manual for scientists of various stripes, providing concrete information on using statistical tools in actual research.
Mar 20, 1930
Publication of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
In 1930, Fisher published his magnum opus, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, in which he used mathematical models to analyze evolution.
This book integrated Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, laying the framework for what was to be called the new evolutionary synthesis.
Fisher’s core message was that genetic variation within populations was the target of natural selection and that this variation was the stuff of evolution.
He defined fitness as the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce, and he demonstrated how variance in fitness at the genetic level could cause natural selection.
Apr 17, 1935
The Design of Experiments
Fisher published The Design of Experiments in 1935. This book outlined the principles of experimental design and familiarized the world with the famous ‘Lady tasting tea’ experiment.
It also explained randomization, replication, and control, which are essential principles in scientific experiments. Fisher's emphasis on randomization has since been adopted as the standard in experimental research.