Sir Ronald Aylmer FisherFRS[5] (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic.[6] For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science"[7][8] and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics".[9] In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin,[10] 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.[11] He is also considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism.[12][13] According to statistician Jeffrey T. Leek, Fisher is the most influential scientist of all time based off the number of citations of his contributions.[14]
From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years;[15] 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.
is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc.) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness,[90][91]
Parental investment
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 ExperimentsFisherian 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.
which explains why the sex ratio is mostly 1:1 in nature.
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.[96]
Sexy son hypothesis
a similarity of one species to another that protects one or both.
Mimicry
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.[97]
The evolution of dominance
[98] which was later found to play a frequent role in genetic polymorphism.
Heterozygote advantage
Demonstrating that the probability of a mutation increasing the 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.
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).[118] 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.[119][120][121] 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.[122][123]
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.[116]
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."[116][124] He conducted extensive correspondence with von Verschuer over decades, which is held at the University of Adelaide.[84]
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":
