Thomas Hoskyns Leonard Blog: February 2022

Friday 25 February 2022

Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962)

In 1911, Ronald Fisher founded the short-lived Cambridge Undergraduate Eugenics Society with

John Maynard Keynes, Horace Darwin, and Professor A,C. Seward F.R.S. In 1912, Ronald

passed his maths exams with a first class honours and served as a steward at the first ever

International Eugenics Congress, in the since largely demolished, highly colonialist Imperial

Institute, in South Kensington, that contained the Queen’s Tower at its centre.

The Eugenics Congress of July 1912 was a grand affair, with over 800 attendees, a reception in

the Duchess of Marlborough’s mansion, and delegates from all over the world, including the

cruelly ableist Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin from the U.S. Eugenics Records Office on

Long Island, New York. The German and Italian embassies were led by Swiss-born psychiatrist

Ernst Rudin and the great economist Corrado Gini, later responsible for crimes against humanity in

Nazi Germany and the Italian colonies in North-East Africa.

The Congress was considered a success (see Clyde Chitty 2007, p38). For the presenters,

“western civilization was in danger of collapse, since we were preserving the weak and ‘genetically

undesirable ‘ and allowing them to breed at an alarming rate…Indeed the pauper pedigrees presented at the Congress –proved conclusively that the poor and the feeble-minded were highly fecund and would one day inherit the earth unless wise men intervened with a program of genetic measures.’.

The first congress and those which followed it into the Nazi Era were to have highly detrimental effects on the vulnerable populations of the world throughout the twentieth century (e,g. on the harsh treatment of the ‘mentally defective’ in Britain and the US that started with the British Mental Deficiency Act of 1913), and to the current day (e.g. the sterilization of indigenous people in Canada, the incarceration of many of their children, and the well documented pseudo-scientific diagnosis and mistreatment of autistic children that is initiated by English geneticists, and coming out of Trinity College Cambridge)

The Imperial Institute, South Kensington

According to Fisher’s daughter and son-in-law Joan and George Box (personal communication),

Fisher was an extremely eccentric individual who was prone to bizarrely cruel

violence against animals, had beaten an UCL ‘beefeater’ with his walking stick for going

about his duty, and who thought that it was only his opinion that mattered, and that people who

questioned his viewpoint were ‘bluddy fools’. Whatever the case, Fisher published numerous

articles in Eugenics Review while fathering eight children, and became very active in the

Eugenics Society, where he pushed his weight around on family planning before resigning in 1934

during a quarrel over the role of scientists.

KEY REFERENCE: In ‘The Elimination of Mental Defect’ in Eugenics Review (1924), Fisher

used some cruel words and highly subjective statistical arguments that purported to justify segregation

or sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded’.

In June 2020, the Council of Gonville and Caius College decided to take down its R.A.Fisher

window, that depicted his celebrated 7x7 Latin Square, because of his involvement in eugenics. I

believe that the Council’s action was well-justified, since I agree with Bernard Norton (1978) to the

effect that eugenics may well have been Fisher’s life-time ‘raison d’etre’ and the

driving force behind his doubtlessly monumental achievements in Statistics and Population

Genetics.

I do not include Fisher’s curious flawed Fiducial Inference in this appraisal. As a

population geneticist Fisher worked in competition with J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright. The

last three chapters of Fisher's 1930 treatise The Genetic Theory of Natural Selection were highly

eugenic and white supremacist in nature. The early chapters are highlighted by his imprecisely and

heuristically presented but apparently, in retrospect, broadly correct 'Fundamental Theorem of Natural

Selection' that has been the subject of immense discussion ever since.

It is generally recognized that Ronald Fisher and Karl Pearson helped turn Statistics from

the relative subjectivity of the nineteenth century into an apparently objective discipline. This

enabled them to claim, e.g. for the purposes of negative eugenics, that two populations were

significantly different but where the supposed difference was not necessarily of practical

significance.

See, for example, Nathaniel Joselson ( 2016 ) who believes that it is therefore

essential to decolonialise the ‘false objectivity’ in Statistics. His article and one of Scott Forster and my

blog posts are quoted by Ann Phoenix (2021), who joins us by heavily criticising the racist and ableist

manner in which Karl Pearson and Sir Ronald Fisher distorted Statistics while imposing eugenics on

the population, and endorsing settler colonialism and population eugenics on a global scale. See also

Leonard (2014) who asserts that “most statistical investigations are inherently subjective in nature,

and statisticians should no longer attempt to achieve ‘false objectivity’.

The effect of ‘false objectivity’ on the practice and teaching of Statistics has been enormous, and Society has been left struggling ever since the early twentieth century with the thorny problems of interpreting p-values, discriminant analysis, and correlation in any sense that can be regarded as objective.

Scott Forster and I reported a variety of Galton’s, Pearson’s and Fisher’s racist, ableist, and anti-semitic

viewpoints and dubious statistics to the UCL Commission of Inquiry in July 2019, together with

details of Lionel Penrose’s potentially harmful influence on the diagnosis and treatment of the

‘mentally defective.’ Despite Penrose’s public stated anti-eugenic opinions I regard him as an

effectively eugenic psychiatrist/ geneticist/ Fisherian statistician. He was the third incumbent of the

UCL Chair of Eugenics, following Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher, but also treated schizophrenic

patients in the Kennedy-Galton Centre in Harperbury Hospital in Hertfordshire.

In his text, Demography and Degeneration, Richard Soloway (1959) reports on the article by

Fisher and Stock (Eugenics Review 6 No.4. January 1915). Since women workers

were more necessary during WW1, Fisher and Stock were concerned that ‘both partners needing to

work’ was becoming more common amongst those seen as eugenically better classes.

They argued:

“That the best energies of married women should be devoted to the interests of home and family

is a proposition about which there is not likely to be any difference of opinion”.

Fisher’s misogynist arguments were partly based in statistics and the theory

of eugenics. Eugenics was, during the mid-war period, to become a driving force of patriarchal

gender roles, and many employed women were ‘sent back to the kitchen sink’ after WW2.

Fisher’s class conscious and chauvinistic attitudes suggest that he was quite prepared

to use pseudo-science to achieve his socio-political objectives.

Fisher reported his analysis of the British 1911 census data in The Genetic Theory of Natural

Selection. He found a high correlation between inter-generational fertility rates and a strong negative

correlation between income and number of children. From this he concluded

that “fertility rates are genetic, and that genes for low fertility are related to hard work and

intelligence”.

This remarkable leap of logic seems to incorporate Fisher's fanciful ideas about gene associations with

interpretations of correlations that might be made spurious by the presence of confounding variables.

Based upon these quite twisted conclusions, Fisher proposed giving family allowances to those defined

as “fit”. With Fishers’ eugenic class prejudices this meant the wealthier.

Fisher continued to practise eugenics while he was at Rothamsted (1919-1933), University College London (1933-1943) and Cambridge (1943-56). See, for example the excellent book byPauline Mazumdar (1992). Fisher made pro-Nazi statements after WW2, and was certainly still a eugenicist in 1952 when he expressed the opinion to UNESCO that men were not created equal in biological terms. The previous year he’d sent UNESCO a letter objecting to their statement on race since it classified many of his published ideas as scientific racism.

Fisher was let off lightly by the UCL Commission of Inquiry in early 2020 when they ‘iceballed’ Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, but UCL took similar measures against Fisher laterafter protests by members of the Commission. The Commission also criticised Lionel Penrose despite his publicly expressed opinions. Rothamsted Research condemned Fisher’s activities in eugenics, and issued a statement utterly rejecting the use of pseudo-scientific arguments to support racist or discriminatory views.

In short, as well as being debunked by his alma mater, Fisher's reputation has been turned on its head by two prestigious organisations who employed him for years. Professor A.W.F. Edwards of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, and Fisher's erstwhile friend and co-author, has expressed his outrage at this turn of events e.g by personal communication with myself.

FURTHERMORE: FISHER AWARD RETIRED (SIGNIFICANCE)

SCATHING ARTICLE BY AUBREY CLAYTON

DEBORAH ASHBY'S 2020 SPEECH

ROYAL SOCIETY TWEET

PREFACE TO JOAN-FISHER BOX's BIOGRAPHY OF HER FATHER
RONALD FISHER. Written in cahoots with George E.P. Box, with the help of A.W.F. Edwards, David Finney, Frank Yates and other ardent followers of Fisher.

Sir Ronald Fisher F.R.S.

REFERENCES

Clyde Chitty (2007) Eugenics, Race, and Intelligence in Education. London: Continuum Publishing

Nathaniel Joselson (2016, Number 2) Meditations in Inclusive Statistics Blog

https://njoselson.github to Fisher-Pearson

Tom Leonard (2014) The Life of a Bayesian Boy: An Interview with Thomas Hoskyns Leonard.

Statistics Views 16 May 2014.

Pauline Mazumdar (1992) Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings, London and New

York: Routledge

Bernard Norton (1978) A fashionable fallacy, defended. New Scientist ( 27 April 1978, p224)

Ann Alison Phoenix (2021) Becomings or Fixity? International Review of Theoretical

Psychologies. Vol 1 No 2 (pp5-20)

ON THE LGBT STRUGGLE IN WISCONSIN IN DECEMBER 1989

A primary-source document relating to a full meeting of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the
UW Field House on 4th December 1989, which received national attention.

‘They’re in for it now!’ as John Nohel, the Director of the Army’s Math Research Center, said, following my speech, to Professor James Koutsky of the UW Department of Chemical Engineering, and our faculty responded by, quite unexpectedly, voting against the military, by about 350 votes to 250. Several of their officers were sitting in full regalia in the front row. Professor David Runyon from UW Whitewater took a film for his television channel and lodged it in the State Archives, and several people ran up to me in the street to thank me for my contribution, which was generally acknowledged as completely turning the tables on the military at the end of an otherwise insipid and quite unconvincing debate.

During my surprisingly devastating speech, I reported that a U.S. army captain had advised me, at an otherwise convivial Second Thursday reception, that ‘these freaks have never even opened a bible’. I also discussed a high-flying naval student in Annapolis who’d been stripped of his degree simply because he expressed his fears to his chaplain that he might be gay. I more generally objected to the intrusions perpetrated by the US military on the innermost thoughts of American students.

Assistant Attorney General for Winconsin, Daniel O’Brien congratulated me afterwards, and he’s visited me in Edinburgh since. The leaders of Madison’s gay community, who were none too keen to raise their own heads above the parapet, congratulated themselves, and gave each other prestigious awards. So much for philanthropy.

Please also google "Gay Discrimination in the Military, University of Wisconsin-Madison"

The item "ROTC under fire" by David M. Halperin describes the enormous impact of the faculty vote. The reports by Professor Joe Elder of the UW Department of Sociology are incomplete in several respects.

Thomas Leonard

https://web.mit.edu/activities/thistle/v9/9.14/rotc-uf.html

9.14 - ROTC Under Fire

ROTC Under Fire

The campus movement to end anti-gay discrimmination in the US armed forces

by David M. Halperin

The following article is reprinted from Blueboy, published in June,
1991. MIT Professor David M. Halperin chronicles the move by colleges
and universities across the country to eliminate discrimination on the
basis of sexual orientation from the military, and specifically from
ROTC. The statements and subsequent policies of higher education
institutions with regard to withdrawing campus support for ROTC are
discussed below, providing an important historical perspective as MIT
convenes its ROTC Task Force.
	The most recent, and perhaps the most serious, challenge to
the Department of Defense policy that bars from military service all
those who do not conform to a standard of exclusive heterosexuality in
their sexual practices has come from an unanticipated quarter -- the
nation's colleges and universities. What has made this movement
possible is the presence on some five hundred campuses of the Reserve
Officers Training Corps, or ROTC. ROTC offers tuition scholarships,
monetary stipends, textbook allowances, and other material benefits to
qualified college students who agree to undergo military training
while in school and to serve in the officer corps of the Armed
Services upon graduation. In conformity with current US military
policy, lesbians and gay men, as well as bisexuals (who, according to
military definitions, do not exist as such and are simply assumed to
be "homosexuals"), are ineligible to join ROTC or to obtain the
various material benefits it provides non-gay undergraduates.
	The current nationwide movement to force ROTC, and by
extension the Department of Defense, to stop discriminating against
sexual non-conformists or to get off campus began in 1982, when
Wisconsin became the first state to pass a lesbian and gay civil
rights law. Two students at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee,
Eric Jernberg and Leon Rouse, decided to ask their school to adhere to
the spirit of the new law by suspending participation in the ROTC
program if that program continued to violate the terms of the
statute. They eventually succeeded in getting their motion passed by
the Faculty Senate, but at a subsequent meeting of the general
faculty, their motion was voted down. This defeat outraged Richard
L. Villaseor, who in the summer of 1986 was about to begin his
sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After
arduous efforts to build an effective campaign and to organize the
faculty, Rick managed to reverse the Milwaukee scenario: his motion
was initially defeated in the Faculty Senate, but he got three times
the necessary votes to convene a meeting of the general faculty, and
on December 4, 1989, several months after Rick had graduated, the
faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, by a vote of 386 to
248, asked the Regents of the University to sever its contracts with
ROTC by June, 1993, unless "those programs no longer discriminate on
the grounds of sexual identity." (The Regents ultimately rejected the
motion, but they lobbied the Wisconsin congressional delegation to
demand that the policy be changed at the Federal level, and the
University appointed a task force to work with other colleges and
universities to put pressure on Washington.)
	The Wisconsin vote touched off an explosion of activism on
campuses around the country. Local protests and actions took place at
colleges and universities throughout the spring of 1990. On May 4,
1990, at 1:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, student leaders on 32
different campuses read an identical statement, distributed by Jordan
Marsh, University Affairs Director at the Wisconsin Student
Association in Madison, protesting Defense Department policy on sexual
orientation. On November 9, 1990, less than a year after the Wisconsin
vote, the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a national
organizing conference at the University of Minnesota called "About
Face: Combating ROTC's Anti-Gay Policy." By that time, more than
eighty schools were involved in the movement. Pitzer College in
southern California had eliminated ROTC from its campus, and Rutgers
University had decided to suspend financial participation in the ROTC
scholarship program. Dramatic developments had also taken place at
many other schools, among them the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, which is where I teach.
	I first became interested in the issue in May, 1989, when
Robert Weinerman, a former MIT student on the staff of the Admissions
Office, showed me a letter he had written to a committee investigating
the relationship between MIT and ROTC, in which he argued that ROTC's
overt and formalized policy of discrimination violated the spirit of
MIT's non-discrimination clause. I quickly realized that this was one
lesbian/gay-rights issue on which academic personnel could have a
decisive influence at the national level: if your school has an ROTC
program, you have a direct line to Washington. In January, 1990, after
the Wisconsin vote -- widely reported in the lesbian and gay press --
I started up a group called Defeat Discrimination at MIT, or
D-DaMIT. With Robert as our strategist, we orchestrated a campus-wide
petition campaign, modeled on the Wisconsin faculty resolution. But
before we were far advanced, Robert L. Bettiker, a senior in Navy
ROTC, came forward with a startling story. It seems that Robb, who had
not realized he was gay when he joined NROTC, had come out to his
commanding officer in November, had duly been expelled from the
program, and had just been ordered by the Secretary of the Navy --
over the recommendation of the local NROTC board, which had found that
Robb had not intended to deceive the Navy about his sexual orientation
when he joined -- to repay nearly $40,000 in NROTC scholarship
support. On March 5, 1990, the day his story appeared in a progressive
MIT student newspaper and the first day of our petition campaign, the
New York Times reported that James Holobaugh, an Army ROTC cadet at
Washington University in St. Louis and former ROTC poster-boy, had
been order to repay $25,000 for identical reasons. The news quickly
became a national scandal.
	D-DaMIT had soon gathered more than two thousand
signatures. In a student referendum that involved half the
undergraduate student body, a majority of those who voted and who
expressed an opinion favored removing ROTC from campus within four
years unless it ceased discriminating on the basis of sexual
orientation -- perhaps the first time such a referendum succeeded on a
college campus. On April 10, 1990, the Provost of MIT, John Deutch, a
former Undersecretary of Energy under the Carter administration and a
Department of Defense insider for many years, wrote a letter to
Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, in which he criticized DOD policy
on sexual orientation and deplored efforts to recoup scholarship funds
from ROTC cadets disenrolled for being gay. This letter, which D-DaMIT
made public, may represent the first time a major Defense Department
figure had visibly dissociated himself from the policy. In the
resulting glare of media attention, the Navy withdrew its demands for
repayment from Bettiker and another NROTC midshipman, while the Army
backed down in the case of Jim Holobaugh. On October 17, 1990, the MIT
Faculty, with explicit support from the students, the administration,
and the Chairman of the board of trustees, approved without dissent a
resolution opposing anti-gay discrimination in ROTC. The resolution
provided for a five-year lobbying effort to eliminate the
discriminatory policy; toward the end of the five-year period, the
President of MIT will appoint a task force to assess the situation,
"with the expectation that inadequate progress toward eliminating the
DOD policy on sexual orientation will result in making ROTC
unavailable to students beginning with the class entering in 1998."
	The struggle is not over. The military continues to pursue its
discriminatory policy ruthlessly and vindictively. As of the summer of
1990, eight cadets in the Navy alone found themselves precisely in
Robb Bettiker's former situation. In 1987 the Navy, seeking to recoup
$25,600 from Peter Laska, a midshipman who had been forced by
systematic harassment to drop out of NROTC at the University of
Pennsylvania, placed a lien on the home of his parents, who discovered
in this manner that their son was gay. And only recently, a
19-year-old Marine Corpswoman, suspected of being lesbian, targeted by
a military investigation, and threatened with all sorts of punishments
if she dId not reveal the names of her friends, unable to face her
parents and unwilling to betray her comrades, took her own life with a
service-issue firearm.
	How long must we wait before colleges and universities will
take steps to protect students, their parents, and the quality of
campus life from such institutionalized harassment? The time to act is
now.
	And in 1995, after a promise to lift the ban on gays in the
military, after a federal policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't
Pursue," the struggle is still not over, and the time to act is still
now. The suspected inadequacy of Clinton"s compromise on
discrimination in the armed forces has been realized over the last two
years as witch-hunts and persecutions of military personnel suspected
of being gay, lesbian, or bisexual continue, often in blatant
disregard of the executive order (see "How is Clinton's Plan Working?
Don't Ask...," this page). As MIT gathers together yet another group
of students and faculty to form its ROTC Task Force, it is imperative
that this campus remains vigilant to the fact that discrimination on
the basis of sexual orientation is alive and well regardless, and in
some cases because, of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" order. The fact
that the DOD policy on gays in the military is in direct conflict with
MIT's non-discrimination policy is well-known; what remains then is
for the MIT community to remedy this campus of ROTC.

Thomas Hoskyns Leonard Blog

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Friday 25 February 2022

SIR RONALD AYLMER FISHER F.R.S, EUGENICIST, NOW WIDELY DEBUNKED

ON THE LGBT STRUGGLE IN WISCONSIN IN DECEMBER 1989

ROTC Under Fire

The campus movement to end anti-gay discrimmination in the US armed forces