Ronald Fisher: Quotes about science

Ronald Fisher was English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist. Explore interesting quotes on science.
Ronald Fisher: 56   quotes 24   likes

“More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.”

Ronald Fisher

Natural selection from the genetical standpoint. Australian Journal of Science 22, 16-17, 1959.
1950s

History , Idea , Understanding , Science

“He has made contributions to many areas of science; among them are agronomy, anthropology, astronomy, bacteriology, botany, economics, forestry, meteorology, psychology, public health, and-above all-genetics, in which he is recognized as one of the leaders. Out of this varied scientific research and his skill in mathematics, he has evolved systematic principles for the interpretation of empirical data; and he has founded a science of experimental design. On the foundations he has laid down, there has been erected a structure of statistical techniques that are used whenever people attempt to learn about nature from experiment and observation.”

Ronald Fisher

W. Allen Wallis (1952) at the University of Chicago while honoring Fisher with the Honorary degree of Doctor of Science; cited in: George E. P. Box (1976) " Science and Statistics http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf" Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 71, No. 356. (Dec., 1976), pp. 791-799.

People , Learning , Health , Nature

“…it was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. … Let the reader … attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty- four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.”

Ronald Fisher

Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s

Nature , Light , Appearance , Science

“Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases — the second law of thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.”

Ronald Fisher book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

On the fundamental theorem of natural selection, Ch. 2, p. 36.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Law , Nature , Thinking , Science