Statistics in Britain 1865-1930: the Social Construction of Scientific
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Statistics in Britain 1865-1930 to my Mother and Father Statistics in Britain 1865 - 1930 The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge Donald A. MacKenzie for the Edinburgh University Press 1981 © Donald A. MacKenzie 1981 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh ISBN O 85224 369 3 Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge & Esher Contents Acknowledgements p. vii 1. Introduction ....................................... p. l Science and its Social Context p.2 Beliefs and Society p .4 Survey p.7 2. Eugenics in Britain ................................ p.15 What is Eugenics? p.15 The Social Composition of the Eugenics Movement p.21 The Professional and the Social Structure p.25 The Professionals and the Eugenic Theory of Society p.29 Eugenics and Capitalism p.31 Eugenic Social Policies and the Twin Crises of Reproduction p .36 Opponents of Eugenics p.46 3. Francis Gaitan .................................... p.51 Eugenics, the InteJlectual Aristocracy and Naturalism p.52 Gallon's Breakthrough p.56 The Bivariate Normal Distribution and Correlation p.63 Galton and the Error Theorists p.68 4. Karl Pearson ...................................... p.73 Pearson's Politics p.75 Pearson's Philosophy p.79 Pearson's Darwinism p.82 Pearson's Eugenics p.84 Pearson's Statistical Biology p.87 Pearson and the Professional Middle Class p.91 5. The Development of Statistical Theory as a Scientific Specialty ............................. p.94 Galton and the Mathematicians p. 95 The Biometric School p.101 Individual Careers and the Social Institution p.106 'Insiders': Elderton, Heron and Greenwood p.109 The 'Outsider': 'Student' p.111 From Eugenics to Statistics p.117 6. Biometrician versusMendelian ..................... p.120 Green Peas, Yellow Peas and Greenish-Yellow Peas p.120 Mathematics and Biology p.125 Heredity and Evolution p.129 Nature and Society: Biometry p.135 Nature and Society: Bateson p.142 Sociobiologies in Competition p.150 7. ThePoliticsoftheContingencyTable ............... p.153 The Issue p .153 Further Developments in Pearson's and Yule's Approaches p.157 The Controversy p.161 The General Character of the Two Approaches p.164 Eugenics and the Measurement of Association p.168 Further Aspects of the Controversy p.175 The Controversy and Social Interests p.180 8. RA.Fisher ...................................... p.183 Fisher, Eugenics and the Professional Middle Class p.184 Genetics and Evolution p.188 The Theory of Statistic.alInference p.200 Fisher's Early Work on StatisticalInference p.204 Fisher versus Pearson p.209 Statistics and Agricultural Research: Fisher at Rotharnstead p.210 9. Conclusion ...................................... p.214 Discovery or Invention? p.214 Science as Goal-Oriented p.216 Social Interests p.220 Then and Now p.225 Appendixes p.227 Notes p.249 Bibliography p.272 Index p.302 vi Acknowledgements Many individuals and organisations provided invaluable assistance in the writing of this book and in the research on which it was based. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Social Science Research Council provided financial support. The Librari ans of University College London, St John's College Cambridge, and the American Philosophical Society allowed me to consult un published papers in their care, as did the Secretaries of the Eugenics Society and Royal Statistical Society, and several individuals: Dr Alan Cock, Professor C. D. Darlington, Messrs David and Richard Garnett, Mr George B. Greenwood, Dr Roy MacLeod and the late Professor Egon Pearson. Some of the chapters of this book draw on material already pub lished in the following articles: 'Eugenics in Britain' and 'Statistical Theory and Social Interests: a Case-Study', both in Social Studies of Science (SAGE Publications Ltd, London and Beverly Hills) 6 (1976) 499-532 and 8 (1978) 35-83; 'Arthur Black: a Forgotten Pioneer of Mathematical Statistics', Biometrika 64 (1977) 613-6; 'Karl Pearson and the Professional Middle Class', Annals of Science 36, (1979) 125-43; 'Sociobiologies in Competition: the Biometri cian-Mendelian Debate', in Charles Webster ( ed.) Biology, Medi cine and Society 1840-1940 (Cambridge: University Press, 1981). I am grateful to the holders of the copyright in these articles for permission to make use of the material here. Preparation of this book has left me with intellectual debts. These are too many to acknowledge in full, but I should like to offer particular thanks to Garland Allen, David Bloor, Geoff Cohen, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, David Edge, Lyndsay Farrall, Jon Har wood, Jon Hodge, Dan Kevles, Bernard Norton, Egon Pearson, Helen Rugen, Steve Shapin, Oscar Sheynin, Gary Werskey and, vii Acknowledgements above all, Barry Barnes. I know they do not all agree with what I have said, but discussion with them has helped sharpen my ideas even where we differ, and whatever is good in what follows owes much to them. It is too often forgotten that it is not only authors whose work goes into the making of books, and I should like to thank everyone involved in the production of this one, and all those friends who have given me support, comfort and encouragement over the eight years in which this book has been in the making. viii 1 Introduction Traditional images of science are under attack. The notion of a continuous process of discovery steadily accumulating neutral, ob jective knowledge has been seriously questioned, and tbe idea of an unambiguous divide between 'science' and 'ideology' no longer seems as secure as it did ten years ago. That there is an 'internal logic' of scientific development unaffected by its social context appears increasingly doubtful. Questions that were closed in reac tion to the Nazis' 'Aryan physics' and to the Stalinists' 'proletarian biology' have been reopened. This questioning of the taken-for-granted is a healthy develop ment. Yet we are unlikely to get very far with our questions if we ask only in the abstract. We must look at particular sciences and examine their relations to their social context to find concrete answers to these puzzles. This book is an attempt to do this for one science, statistical theory as it developed in Britain in the last third of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century, though I shall also make excursions into the closely related histories of genetics and evolutionary biology. There are advantages and disadvantages in the focus on statistics. One advantage is that the 'science and society' debate has so far dealt largely with sciences such as psychology and biology. To take as the example a mathematical discipline - indeed that discipline most frequently employed to 'harden' the 'soft' sciences-is perhaps to move the debate a step further. A major disadvantage, however, is that the mathematical nature of statistical theory renders it rela tively inaccessible to many people. I have been acutely aware of this in writing this book, and have tried to keep firmly in mind the needs of those with little or no statistical training. This book would be a failure were it to be readable only by 'experts'. One of its aims, after Statistics in Britain all, is to provide an insight for the non-expert into one of the most potent sources of expertise: the sophisticated mathematical treat ment of numerical data. With this in view, I have banished most of the mathematics into the appendixes and provided a glossary ( appendix 8) of the techni cal terms used most often in the text. What remains can all be read, I hope, by those who know arithmetic and some school algebra. In addition, I have tried to arrange the material so that the parts containing technical material ( chiefly chapters 3, 6, 7 and 8, al though 6 deals with biology rather than statistics) are separate from the non- technical sections. It would thus be possible to grasp much of the argument by reading the remaining sections first, and post poning the more technical sections for later reading. To facilitate this, a survey of the historical developments to be discussed and of the argument of this book will be provided at the end of this chapter. But first of all it is perhaps worth while to discuss some of the general issues raised by this study. Science and its Social Context No one doubts that there must be some relationship between science and the social context in which it develops. Disagreement centres on the nature of this relationship and, broadly speaking, two distinct views can be identified. The first is the older and more influential, whereby society can indeed affect science, but in a strictly limited way. The extent of social support for science influences the pace of scientific advance, and the direction in which this support is chan nelled may lead to one scientific discipline growing more quickly than another. The social context can affect the content of scientific advance, as well as its pace, but only in a negative way. As the examples of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia show, over-strong social influences can cause bad science. They can divert scientific advance from its proper path. As Joseph Ben-David puts it, 'ideo logical bias' can lead science into 'blind alleys', but good science is determined in its content by 'the conceptual state of science and by individual creativity - and these follow their own laws, accepting neither command nor bribe' (Ben-David 1971, 11-12). 1 Thus, in discussing the emergence of modem statistics, Ben David points to various social and institutional factors affecting the development of the discipline in Britain and the United States. He attributes the rapid growth of statistics in the United States to the responsiveness of American universities to practical needs. Brit- 2 Introduction ain's universities were not responsive in this way, but there was a 'functional equivalent' in the 'semiformal and informal networks and·circles comprising the academic elite and outstanding research ers and intellectuals outside the academic field' (ibid., 151).