Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Ronald Fisher

Quote by Ronald Fisher

“We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.”

Quote by Ronald Fisher

Author

Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher

Ronald Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962) was a British statistician, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist, regarded as one of the founders of modern statistics. He developed key statistical methods such as analysis of variance, maximum likelihood estimation, and Fisher's exact test, and applied statistical theory to genetics and evolutionary biology, contributing to the modern evolutionary synthesis. Fisher studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge University, later worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station and University College London, and spent his final years in Australia. His work profoundly influenced experimental design, biostatistics, and population genetics, though his support for eugenics remains controversial. more

You May Also Like

“What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology. Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed.”

“According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.”

“Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

“And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.”