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Ronald Fisher Quotes about Science

All Ronald Fisher Quotes Evolution Giving Science quotes
Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

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

Ronald Fisher
Knowledge, Science, Experience

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

Ronald Fisher
Science, Pythagorean Theorem, Analysis
"Statistics in agricultural research". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1934.

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Ronald Fisher
Science, Men, Thinking

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 Fisher
Science, May, Chance

No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question, at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.

Ronald Fisher
Nature, Science, Views

If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.

Ronald Fisher
Science, Odds, Giving

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
Science, Support, Intellectual
"Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1956.

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
Science, Variation, Experiments

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

Ronald Fisher
Knowledge, Science, World

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
Science, Light, Evolution
"Evolution as a Process". Book edited by J. S. Huxley, A. C. Hardy and E. B. Ford, 1954.

The neutral zone of selective advantage in the neighbourhood of zero is thus so narrow that changes in the environment, and in the genetic constitution of species, must cause this zone to be crossed and perhaps recrossed relatively rapidly in the course of evolutionary change, so that many possible gene substitutions may have a fluctuating history of advance and regression before the final balance of selective advantage is determined.

Ronald Fisher
Zero, Science, Balance

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