See also BLOGPOST by Joe Cain
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
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)
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