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 A. Fisher

Ronald A. Fisher Quotes

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 A. Fisher

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

— Ronald A. Fisher

No efforts of mine could avail to make the book easy reading.

— Ronald A. Fisher
Reading

After all, it is a common weakness of young authors to put too much into their papers.

— Ronald A. Fisher

Fairly large print is a real antidote to stiff reading.

— Ronald A. Fisher
Reading

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 A. Fisher

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 A. Fisher

I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.

— Ronald A. 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.

— Ronald A. Fisher

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

— Ronald A. Fisher

Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

— Ronald A. Fisher

The best time to plan an experiment is after you’ve done it.

— Ronald A. Fisher

Natural selection is not evolution.

— Ronald A. Fisher

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.

— Ronald A. Fisher

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 A. Fisher

The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.

— Ronald A. Fisher

This is perhaps the most important book on evolutionary genetics ever written.

— Ronald A. Fisher

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 A. Fisher

No isolated experiment, however significant in itself, can suffice for the experimental demonstration of any natural phenomenon; for the “one chance in a million” will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.

— Ronald A. Fisher

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

— Ronald A. Fisher
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