Ronald Fisher

And some of the, some of the characters in our paper are kind of big players in that story.

All of them, Haldane, Fisher, and Penrose, all have things to say in that story.

I think there's a certain amount to say for that, um, and a certain amount to say that genetics emerges and grows as a discipline, and part of its growth is a kind of throwing off of its past and attempts to, um, distance itself from its past.

So that is certainly something that some historians are interested in and have, and have written about.

Do you have a perspective, Sarah, as a geneticist and somebody involved in training new geneticists?

Well, it's, it's one of those things that I must say it's, it's a real privilege to talk to Alex and Maria and to have read the paper and have learnt so much because it was a real gap for me, I think.

I was trained as a geneticist, and I sat, um, as I, I've written in a commentary, I sat beneath Fisher's window and thought about statistics and genetics.

And I think probably this paper came out of a feeling that there was something missing and that we as a, a, a society of geneticists didn't have the expertise to really look at this properly, but we felt there was something missing.

I was just talking to someone about this 'cause I was at a conference last week where Andrew Meade was one of the speakers.

Andrew, he runs the, it's the one that, like, Fisher was at, Rothamsted Research.

Anyways, so he's the director of stat at Rothamsted Research.

His dad also was a statistician.

But we were just, like, talking about, it was kind of, I don't know, I think that how, like, historically, for better or for worse, like, people fall in the same, you know, if your dad was a blacksmith and, and you were the eldest, then, like, you had to be a blacksmith, and this was, I think there are pluses and minuses to some of this stuff.

Like, it's good now that there are lots of opportunities for people to do whatever their dreams are.

And it's funny you mention Ronald Fisher too, 'cause I think even his, like, daughter was a statistician that then married, like, George Box or someone.

So, like-

Despite the differences of their approach, they pursued the same overarching goal, which was, quote, to show that theoretical mathematical approaches had a place in biology, that theory could guide experiment and research, and that it was not worth waiting until all the facts were in before engaging in speculation with the help of mathematical models, end quote.

But perhaps the biggest success story in applying mathematical methods in theoretical biology was in population genetics, established as a discipline by J.B.S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher, and Sewall Wright.

Together, these three men developed the modern synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, reconciling natural selection with the laws of heredity.

J.B.S. Haldane, aside from population genetics, was also the first to realize the theoretical possibility of, and experimentally demonstrate, genetic linkage in mammals.

We might lose our jobs because of that, but medical ethics is patient first, beneficence to the patient.

There was one of those trials that came out as negative that showed that the mortality benefit had a p-value or Fisher's preference of 0.09%.

So because it wasn't 0.05, they put it into the no group.

And I've done a lot of thinking about this p-value thing because it gets drummed into students that p-value of 0.05 is a yes-no.

And even Ronald Fisher hated that idea.

Who's Ronald Fisher? Ronald Fisher was the person who came up with p equals 0.05 in, I think it was 1926.

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

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