Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. He was described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science". Richard Dawkins described him as "the greatest of Darwin's successors".
Professional years [change]
In 1919 Fisher started work at Rothamsted Experimental Station at Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England. Here he started a major study of the extensive collections of data recorded over many years. This resulted in a series of reports under the general title Studies in crop variation.
This began a period of great productivity. Over the next seven years, he pioneered the principles of the design of experiments and elaborated his studies of the analysis of variance. He studied the statistics of small samples. Perhaps even more important, he began his systematic approach of the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods.
He began to pay particular attention to the labour involved in the necessary computations, and developed practical methods. In 1925, his first book was published: Statistical methods for research workers. This went into many editions and translations in later years, and became a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines. In 1935, this was followed by The design of experiments, which also became a standard.
His work on the theory of population genetics made him one of the three great figures of that field, together with Sewall Wright and J.B.S. Haldane. He was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis. In addition to founding modern quantitative genetics with his 1918 paper, he was the first to use diffusion equations to attempt to calculate the distribution of gene frequencies among populations.
He pioneered the estimation of genetic linkage and gene frequencies by maximum likelihood methods. His 1950 paper on gene frequency clines is notable as the first application of a computer to biology.
Fisher had a long and successful collaboration with E.B. Ford in the field of ecological genetics. The outcome of this work was the recognition that the force of natural selection was often much stronger than had been appreciated. Many ecogenetic situations (such as polymorphism) were not selectively neutral, on the contrary, they were maintained by the force of selection.
Fisher was the original author of the idea of heterozygote advantage, which was later found to play a frequent role in genetic polymorphism. The discovery of indisputable cases of natural selection in nature was one of the main strands in the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Therefore he proposed the abolishment of the economic advantage of small families by instituting subsidies (he called them allowances) to families with larger numbers of children, with the allowances proportional to the earnings of the father. He himself had two sons and six daughters. According to Yates and Mather, "His large family, reared in conditions of great financial stringency, was a personal expression of his genetic and evolutionary convictions".
The book was reviewed, among others, by physicist Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles Darwin's. After his review, C.G. Darwin sent Fisher his copy of the book, with notes in the margin. The marginal notes became the food for a correspondence running at least three years. Fisher's book also had a major influence on W.D. Hamilton and the development of his theories on the genetic basis for kin selection.