Fisher, Ronald

Schenk, Ronald. The sunken quest, the wasted fisher, the pregnant fish postmodern reflections on depth psychology. Wilmette (IL) Chiron Publications, 2001. xiv, 166 p. ISBN 1-88860-215-5... 

This is, in essence, the modern synthesis of Darwin and Mendel achieved in the 1930s by Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane. Based on a series of relatively straightforward equations, it also took the study of evolution out of meticulously observed natural history and located it within a more abstract mathematised theory. Indeed, evolution itself came to be defined not in terms of organisms and populations, but as the rate of change of gene frequencies within any given population. One consequence has been a tendency for theoretical evolutionists to retreat further and further into abstract hypotheticals based on computer simulations, and to withdraw from that patient observation of the natural world which so characterised Darwin s own method . 

We are grateful also to the Literary Executor of the late Sir Ronald A. Fisher, F. R. S., to Dr. Frank Yates, F. R. S., and to Longman Group Ltd., London, for permission to partially reprint Tables III and V from their book Statistical Tables for Biological, Agricultural and Medical Research, 6th ed., 1974. 

I am indebted to the Literary Executor of the late Sir Ronald A. Fisher, FRS, Cambridge, to Mr Frank Yates, FRS, Rothamsted, and to Messrs Oliver Boyd, Ltd, for permisston to reprint Tables la, lb, Ic, and Id, Table in, and Table VI. These are abridged from Tables V, III, and VI which are published in Statistical Tables for Biological, Agricultural, and Medical Research by Fisher and Yates (Oliver Boyd). 

This distillation process is usually carried out using statistical procedures. However, as Sir Ronald Fisher remarked, for this process to be successful, the data set has to contain the information sought. 

Historically, factorial designs were introduced by Sir Ronald A. Fisher to refute the, then (1935), prevalent idea that if one were to discover the effect of a factor, all other factors must be held constant and only the factor of interest... 

Yates s algorithm (named after Frank Yates, a co-worker of Ronald Fisher, 1902-94) is applied to the observations after they have been arranged in the standard order. As shown in Table 2.2, the Yates calculations start by evaluating as many auxiliary columns as factors are considered, in our example three columns El, E2 and E3 for a 2 design. 

In the over-all process involved in analyzing a real sample, the factors we are not aware of, in the words of Sir Ronald Fisher, are strictly innumerable. If we take the trouble to look, we find under supposedly identical conditions significant variability from day to day, from laboratory to laboratory, from instrument to instrument, and from man to man—to name only a few. A celebrated example is the measure-... 

We are grateful also to the Literary Executor of the late Sir Ronald A. Fisher, F. 

As noted in Section 7.5, the test statistic in ANOVAs is called F, and the test is sometimes called the F-test. The name pays respect to Sir Ronald Fisher, the statistician who developed this approach. Similarly to the calculation of the test statistic t in a f-test, F is calculated as a ratio, as follows ... 

The technique of randomization was pioneered in the field of agriculture (plants too show considerable individual variation) by Sir Ronald Fisher, a visionary statistician. It is generally acknowledged that the first randomized clinical trial, conducted in the 1940s, was a study evaluating the use of streptomycin in treating tuberculosis conducted by the (British) Medical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee. The results were published in the British Medical Journal in 1948. 

The function on the right comes from the work of Sir Ronald Fisher (1925). It is given by... 

The value of P is used as a criterion to decide whether chance is a plausible explanation of the difference seen in the study data. If P is sufficiently low, chance may be thought to be an implausible explanation for the difference. The famous British statistician and geneticist Sir Ronald Fisher FRS proposed that the value 0-05 (or 5%) should be used as the criterion for judging if a value of P was sufficiently low to reject chance as the explanation of the difference - this is called the 0-05 or 5% level of statistical significance. So, the P = 0-017 would be sufficiently low to permit the conclusion that the difference was statistically significant - that is, that chance is an implausible explanation of the difference. On the other hand, P = 0-095 is not sufficiently small for chance to be thought an implausible explanation for the result put another way, the difference is not statistically significant. 

Near the top of anyone s list of the ten greatest evolutionists since Darwin will be the English statistician Ronald Fisher. .. and the Russian-bom American Theodosius Dobzhansky. Both were ardent Christians (Ruse, 2001, pp. 8-9). 

Ronald A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Sdectiorf, Oxford University Press, 1930. 

Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson (1892-1964) British geneticist and evolutionary biologist in Cambridge and London he was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics. 

A factorial experiment, by definition, is one consisting of two or more variable factors, whose assigned values are usually called levels. The term appears to have been coined by Ronald Fisher in 1926. If all possible combinations are used, the experiment is referred to as full factorial. Very commonly, half of the possible combinations are used the experiment then designated as half-factoriaL Example 1 uses the half-factorial design. 

This use of a significance level as a dichotomous classifier to sort out causal from chance associations ignores the genesis of the test of statistical significance. Most writers aclmowledge Sir Ronald Fisher as the source of the now sacramental criterion value, p = 0.05. Fisher s own position on the matter is interesting. In his 1925 edition of Statistical Methods for Research Workers, he stated ... 

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