R.A.Fisher according to Adam Rutherford. A critical assessment of his account in Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

Abstract

In Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics Adam Rutherford introduced the statistician and evolutionary geneticist R.A.Fisher as ‘leaving a colossal scientific legacy’ but who ‘was also a committed eugenicist throughout his life, and maintained close ties with a Nazi scientist who had worked alongside Josef Mengele on human remains from Jews murdered in death camps’. This paper examines the book’s arguments for such a charge of Nazi guilt by association.