Quote

If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.

Ronald Fisher

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Ronald Fisher
Age: 72 †
Born: 1890
Born: February 17
Died: 1962
Died: July 29
Astronomer
Biologist
Geneticist
Mathematician
Statistician
London
England
Ronald Aylmer Fisher
R. A. Fisher
Ronald A. Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
R.A. Fisher
Social
Step
Calculations
Work
Toward
Phenomena
Among
Statistics
Antecedent
Choose
Advance
Evaluating
Groups
Total
Causation
Steps
Absence
Calculation
Causes
Group
Correlation
Knowledge
Importance
Partial

More quotes by Ronald Fisher

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The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.
Ronald Fisher
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The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.
Ronald Fisher
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I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.
Ronald Fisher
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The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.
Ronald Fisher
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In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
Ronald Fisher
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The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.
Ronald Fisher
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No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?
Ronald Fisher
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We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.
Ronald Fisher
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The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.
Ronald Fisher
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Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.
Ronald Fisher
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Faith does not mean credulity...
Ronald Fisher
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To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.
Ronald Fisher
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Natural selection is not evolution.
Ronald Fisher
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It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.
Ronald Fisher
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This is perhaps the most important book on evolutionary genetics ever written
Ronald Fisher
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We can set no limit to human potentialities all that is best in man can be bettered it is not a question of producing a highly efficient machine, ... but of quickening all the distinctly human features, all that is best in man, all the different qualities, some obvious, some infinitely subtle, which we recognize as humanly excellent.
Ronald Fisher
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However, perhaps the main point is that you are under no obligation to analyse variance into its parts if it does not come apart easily, and its unwillingness to do so naturally indicates that one's line of approach is not very fruitful.
Ronald Fisher
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... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.
Ronald Fisher
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... no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and his ideas.
Ronald Fisher
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A book that I rate only second in importance in evolution theory to Darwin 's Origin (this as joined with its supplement Of Man), and also rate as undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the twentieth century
Ronald Fisher