100 YEARS AGO

Is his letter of last week detailing his most interesting experiments on cross-bred maize, Mr. R. H. Lock makes the following statement:– “I see from the published account of a recent discussion at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association that the facts of Mendelian segregation are still disputed by the biometric school of evolutionists.” Now it is easy to make a general statement about some vaguely defined group of men, and I have no right to speak for biometricians as a body. But as inventor of the term biometry, I may perhaps be allowed to say what I understand by it as a science, and to restate what I said with some emphasis at the Cambridge meeting. Biometry is only the application of exact statistical methods to the problems of biology. It is no more pledged to one hypothesis of heredity than to another, but it must be hostile to all treatment which uses statistics without observing the laws of statistical science. The criticism which has been published in Biometrika upon Mendelian work has attacked its too frequent want of method and of logic, and I think no one can have read recent literature without seeing that the criticism has been effective in its aim.

Karl Pearson

From Nature 27 October 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

Lord Boyd Orr, summing up the symposium [“The Numbers of Man and Animals”], said that he welcomed all the developments there might be in sanitation and preventive medicine, on one hand, and contraception on the other. To a large extent they cancel one another out, but he expected the world to hold perhaps 4G (G=109) people by 1980 and 5 or 6G by the end of the century... The difficulties that he foresaw were political rather than scientific. Physics appears to governments to be much more useful than biology both in war and for making money; it therefore gets the lion's share of research endowment. People had got on very well in the past without jet planes and hydrogen bombs, but they could not get on without food, and he looked forward to an era of agrarian abundance in which we no longer galloped through irreplaceable resources with our present abandon but farmed wisely and depended for our energy supplies primarily on the inexhaustible flow from the sun.

From Nature 30 October 1954.