Dr Fisher's Casebook: The Shoulders of Giants

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SignificanceVolume 10, Issue 5 p. 20-20 FeaturesFree Access Dr Fisher's casebook: The shoulders of giants First published: 29 October 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2013.00692.xAboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In June this year, Significance published extracts from G. E. P. Box's memoir An Accidental Statistician1, inspiring me to order a copy. When it arrived, I remarked to my significant other that each chapter began with a quote from Alice in Wonderland. “You've found a fellow spirit, then”, she replied, or words to that effect. I recommend An Accidental Statistician (I also of course recommend Alice), but I was startled to read a foreword from the publishers which claimed that the great man had published not only 12 books but also more than 2000 journal articles. That impressive tally would leave me trailing far behind. Over a 40-year career it would work out at pushing one a week. Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice. Was it possible? I had to check and, after a diligent search of the Web of Science and multiple G. Boxes, I concluded that 200 was a better estimate. Always check the data. Those zeros can be tricky. This led me to wonder how many papers my great namesake, R. A. Fisher, father-in-law of George Box, had on the same database. This was not an easy question, as it turned out that there are many more R. A. Fishers than G. Boxes beavering away in the world of research. But moving back through the archive, I was drawn to one of our Fisher's last publications, simply entitled “Biometry”2. The World Wide Web is a wonderful thing; I was able to download “Biometry” from JSTOR, and it was a fascinating read. In this paper, originally delivered in 1948 but published in a memorial volume in 1964, Fisher argued that the first great revolution in thought was when the ancient Greeks developed geometry – earth measurement. This was the true origin of mathematics, the notion of proof being able to demonstrate things beyond dispute, and of deductive reasoning, going from the general to the particular. Thought continued in much the same way for more than 2000 years, until the development of biometry – life measurement. Fisher thought that our founding father was Galton, a man who was interested in variability in many spheres. For Fisher, variation was the key to statistics: we should be interested in distributions, not in central tendency. The example he gave is worth quoting, if only for its contemporary relevance: Then again, we still have the administrative compromise, such as “A fair wage is one sufficient to maintain in decency a wife and three children”, and it is with pained surprise, and with great reluctance, that the administrator learns to admit that such a decision will leave half the real children of the country, belonging to families of four or more, insufficiently provided for, and that at the same time it saddles the wage fund with providing for about twenty million non-existent children. In this aspect family allowances constitute an elementary recognition of the unwelcome fact of biological variability. A nice knockdown argument”, as Carroll's Humpty Dumpty put it. No doubt one that particularly appealed to a father of eight! (Interesting also that in his day half the children of the country belonged to families of four or more.) Fisher thought that biometry was the opposite of geometry, in that it led to inductive reasoning, from the particular to the general. When we interpret data from a sample and draw conclusions about a population, we draw from a few people, or bees, or blue whales, or flamingos, or hedgehogs, or mad hatters or tea parties or March hares or even dormice, a conclusion about the world. As so often, Fisher was right. Statistics is really at the very forefront of human development. References 1Box, G. E. P. (2013) An Accidental Statistician. Chichester: Wiley. Wiley Online LibraryGoogle Scholar 2Fisher, R. A. (1964) Biometry. Biometrics, 20, 261– 264. CrossrefWeb of Science®Google Scholar Volume10, Issue5October 2013Pages 20-20 ReferencesRelatedInformation