The Life and Times of Statistician and Geneticist Extraordinaire, R.A. Fisher

Ronald Aylmer Fisher

“The fascination of Fisher for me is that my research is mainly in evolutionary biology, which involves a certain amount of genetics from time to time, and I teach and have done some research in statistics. So I look to Fisher as a founding father in all three of the disciplines that we are celebrating.”
–Alan Grafen

Ronald Aylmer Fisher was born on February 17, 1890 in East Finchley, London to George Fisher, who was a fine arts auctioneer, and Katie Heath. Fisher was the youngest of seven, and according to relatives, was a precocious child while also showing surprisingly advanced arithmetic skills at as young as the age of three. When Fisher was fourteen, his mother passed away, and in that same year, he also received a scholarship in mathematics to the school, Harrow. From a young age, Fisher’s eyesight was quite poor and because of this, he usually listened in class without ever taking any notes, and solved problems mentally, which proved to be useful later on in his life.

In 1909, Fisher received a scholarship to Cambridge, concentrating mainly on mathematics, theoretical physics, and astronomy. In 1911, the formation of Cambridge University Eugenics Society was formed under Fisher’s persistence, and he often spoke on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection as he looked up to Darwin. Much of Fisher’s statistical interest stemmed from this group, and he also grew to have a great interest in evolutionary theory, specifically with genetics. In April of 1912, Fisher published his first paper, which showed what would later come to be known as the method of maximum likelihood. He graduated in 1912 with distinction, but his tutor, however, believed differently of him, saying, "...if he had stuck to the ropes he would have made a first class mathematician, but he would not."

Fisher was awarded the Wollaston scholarship, which allowed him to stay at Cambridge for a year longer and he continued his studies on Theory of Errors by George Airy. This newfound interest led him to examine statistical problems. After finishing at Cambridge, Fisher briefly worked at a farm in Canada, but soon returned to London and became a statistician in the Mercantile and General Investment Company for a few years (1913-1915). Then he was a high school mathematics and science teacher for a handful of years. Teaching was his way of serving the country because he was rejected from the army due to his poor eyesight. It turned out that as a teacher, he was mediocre at best, but was definitely recognized as an exceptional thinker who usually had difficulties explaining his complex ideas to other people. His statistical work at the time drew attention from Karl Pearson who was a well-known statistician of the era. Pearson published Fisher’s article on general sampling distribution and without telling Fisher, included a critique of Fisher’s paper. This led to a heated confrontation between the two, and it turned out that Fisher was actually correct in his claims, but as Pearson was popular in the day, Fisher’s papers were withdrawn from the Royal Society due to the conflict between Pearson and Fisher.

“He was the greatest statistician in the world, a geneticist of such prescience that the genius of his conclusions is still unfolding itself today.”
-E.B. Ford

In 1917, Fisher married Ruth Eileen Guinness, and they had eight children together, but eventually separated. Fisher published many noteworthy papers, including establishing a way of doing sample measurement in statistics using mathematics. He also wrote a few papers on eugenics because of his concern coming from the upper class as he had the belief that “less talented” lower class families produced offspring at a faster rate than the “more talented” upper class families. In 1918, he wrote a paper on Gregor Mendel’s theory of inherited characteristics, which would lead to his work on the statistical analysis of variance later on. Fisher decided to stop teaching in 1919 after being offered a position by Sir John Russell as a statistician at the Rothamsted Experimental Station (as shown in the photo below), which was the oldest agricultural research institute in the UK. In his time there, Fisher made numerous contributions to the statistical approach of experiments including the design, as well as genetics.

Fisher put together the analysis of variance, which is an important component still used in statistical analysis today. He also promoted sub-experiments in which several factors of an experiment are varied at one time instead of just one factor. With his skills as a newfound researcher and statistician, Fisher published Statistical Methods for Research Workers in 1925, which basically summarized the design and analysis of experiments during his time in Rothamsted. Apparently though, it is extremely difficult to read and understand that his colleague, M.G. Kendall, said, "Somebody once said that no student should attempt to read it unless he had read it before".

As a statistician, he perfected many statistical tests, and he built on his earlier work of the maximum likelihood estimate, but his time in Rothamsted led him down an unlikely path. Due to his interest in genetics and the nature of his job, he began to breed various types of animals like mice, snails and poultry. He became so engrossed in this that he began to do this at home too! In doing this, he applied his findings and theories about gene dominance to Mendel’s work on inheritance. With these findings, he published The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection in 1930, which has been called the deepest book on evolution since Darwin!

In his book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Fisher showed that selection always favors the dominance of beneficial genes. He connects Mendel’s mathematical results being matched to Charles Darwin’s natural selection. Fisher’s main contribution to evolution included a combination of all three necessary disciplines: genetics, evolutionary biology, and statistics. Perhaps what Fisher views to be his biggest contribution to evolutionary biology is the fundamental theorem. What exactly is the fundamental theorem? Due to the complexity in which Fisher illustrates it, most biologists can’t understand it in Fisher’s writing. Sewall Wright never even understood the fundamental theorem, and funny enough, Fisher did not find adaptive landscapes useful at all... Most population textbooks ignore the fundamental theorem or completely misunderstand it. In modern terms, according to A. W. Edward (1994), the fundamental theorem is “The rate of increase in the mean fitness of any organism at any time ascribable to natural selection acting through changes in gene frequencies is exactly equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.” Fisher along with Sewall Wright, and J.B.S. Haldane (all three shown in the photo below) were really the pioneers that provided the mathematical basis for evolutionary theory.

In 1933, Fisher left Rothamsted and became the Galton Chair of Eugenics, while continuing to publish papers on statistical science. Fisher became a Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge University in 1943, and served as president of the Royal Society for a few years. He received many accolades including the Royal Medal of the Society in 1938, Darwin Medal of the Society in 1948, Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1955, and more. He left Cambridge in 1959 to Adelaide, Australia, and even then continued to be a statistical researcher until he passed away in 1962.

“There seems little I can say by way of summary of so great a scientist and so great a friend except perhaps this: he was supremely an individualist, and if ever there was a man whose life was guided wholly by the truth, as he perceived it, it was Sir Ronald Fisher.”
-E.B. Ford

Literature Cited:
1. Crow, J. F., and W. F. Dove. "Perspectives: Anecdotal, Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics." Genetics Society of America (2005).

2. Fienberg, S. E., and D. V. Hinkley. R.A. Fisher, An Appreciation. New York: Springer Verlag, 1980.

3. "Fisher Biography." MacTutor History of Mathematics. School of Mathematics and Statistics. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fisher.html.

4. Grafen, A. "Fisher the Evolutionary Biologist." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series D (The Statistician) 52.3 (2003): 319-17.

5. "Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher." University of Minnesota Morris. http://www5555.morris. umn.edu/ ~sungurea/introstat/history/w98/RAFisher.html.

6. Skipper, R. A. "The Persistence of the R.A. Fisher-Sewall Wright." Biology and Philosophy 17 (2002): 341-42.