Statistical thinking and eugenicist thinking are, in fact, deeply intertwined, and many of the theoretical problems with methods like significance testing-first developed to identify racial differences-are remnants of their original purpose, to support eugenics. Statistics, as a lens through which scientists investigate real-world questions, has always been smudged by the fingerprints of the people holding the lens. It would be convenient if statistics existed outside of history, but that’s not the case. Ideally, statisticians would like to divorce these tools from the lives and times of the people who created them. What we now understand as statistics comes largely from the work of Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, whose names appear in bread-and-butter terms like “Pearson correlation coefficient” and “Fisher information.” In particular, the beleaguered concept of “statistical significance,” for decades the measure of whether empirical research is publication-worthy, can be traced directly to the trio. In this version, it’s as if Stonewall Jackson developed quantum physics. Unlike tearing down monuments to white supremacy in the American South, purging statistics of the ghosts of its eugenicist past is not a straightforward proposition. Dark Prophets: Karl Pearson (left) referred to eugenics as “the directed and self-conscious evolution of the human race,” which he said Francis Galton (right) had understood “with the enthusiasm of a prophet.” Wikipedia In science, these are the equivalents of toppling a Confederate statue and hurling it into the sea. After similar outcries about eugenics, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies renamed its annual Fisher Lecture, and the Society for the Study of Evolution did the same for its Fisher Prize. In response to protests over the conference, UCL announced this June that it had stripped Galton’s and Pearson’s names from its buildings and classrooms. UCL was an epicenter of the early 20th-century eugenics movement-a precursor to Nazi “racial hygiene” programs-due to its ties to Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and his intellectual descendants and fellow eugenicists Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. The existence of the conference was surprising, but the choice of location was not. In early 2018, officials at University College London were shocked to learn that meetings organized by “race scientists” and neo-Nazis, called the London Conference on Intelligence, had been held at the college the previous four years.
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