Sir R A Fisher and the evolution of genetics

Abstract

27 RESONANCE September 1997 In the realm of science, the twentieth century has been, by and large, a time of ever increasing specialisation. It is hard, and some would no doubt say impossible, to find amongst the scientists of this century, people who can legitimately be considered the founding fathers of more than one distinct field of scientific endeavour. Amidst the many great scientists of our century, however, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962) stands out as a glorious exception in this regard. During the first half of this century, Fisher almost single-handedly laid the foundation for much of what we today recognise as the academic discipline of statistics (see accompanying article by Krishnan). Fisher also developed much of the theoretical framework of population and quantitative genetics, a body of work that provides the conceptual underpinnings for fields as disparate as plant and animal breeding and evolutionary biology.