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> <div> The career of Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890 - 1962), a mathematician, eugenicist and founder of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, illustrates how a scientist’s works — charitable acts, marriage and child rearing, church attendance — are essential for understanding science and religion in their lives. Scholars have struggled to find intellectual coherence in Fisher’s commitments to Darwinism, Anglican Christianity and eugenics. The problem can be addressed by asking whether there was anything in Fisher’s practical experience that gave coherence to his interests and beliefs. What practical mode of faith, or faithful mode of practice, shaped his life? It was above all the family, or rather families, with their myriad of practical and emotional challenges, that rendered a mathematically based eugenic Darwinian Christianity not just possible, but vital, for Fisher.
> <br> From his mother, Fisher acquired not only a lifelong devotion to the Church of England, but abnormally bad eyesight and an incapacity to enter into others’ feelings. Known as “Piggie” at Cambridge for his tiny thick spectacles and dishevelled appearance, Fisher found strength in Nietzsche’s superman and acclaim for his mathematical treatment of Darwinian natural selection. In 1911, Fisher helped set up a university eugenics society, which attracted churchmen like himself, full of noblesse oblige, who preached “positive eugenics” as a practical method of human redemption.
> <br> Fisher became acquainted with the Darwin family, which was the most illustrious scientific family in town and a mainstay of the university eugenics society. Leonard, Charles Darwin’s second-youngest son, became Fisher’s patron. As president of the national Eugenics Society, Darwin argued for “bigger families in good stocks;” Fisher honored him “as a father,” dedicating to him his famous, Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930). With Darwin’s blessing, Fisher found security and direction through the third family in his life, the Grattan Guinnesses, a dynasty of globetrotting evangelists who lived and breathed the conviction that divinely appointed world redemption was soon to be realized through their own faithful works.
> <br> In 1917, Fisher married Eileen Grattan Guinness, a 10th child whose father was one of nine. With the prospect of a large family of their own, they worked an experimental farm where evangelical resourcefulness joined Darwinian Anglicanism in a scientific mission to renew mankind through the breeding of a messianic race. With the first of their eight children, they moved to the Rothamsted Agricultural Research Station where Fisher continued experiments that used revolutionary statistical methods to demonstrate how far environmental factors affected crop yields. He devised a policy for correcting a negative environmental factor in society: selection for infertility arising from smaller families in “good stocks.” He believed differential family allowances, paid in direct proportion to household income, would provide an incentive for well-off families to have more children. Superior men and women could then choose partners for the joy of having babies and produce them without fearing loss of living standards, Fisher claimed.
> <br> Eileen Fisher finally had enough of eugenic marriage, and in 1942 she renewed her traditional faith. After Leonard Darwin’s death the following year, Fisher left the family to take the genetics professorship in Cambridge. He then spoke more openly about his own Christian commitment, though he still sought the security of saving grace through faithful works performed with iron-willed determination. “If men are to see our good works, it is of course necessary that they should be good, but also, and emphatically, they should work in making the world a better place.” In 1957, he retired to Australia where he died in 1962. He told no member of his family of his cancer or his impending surgery. He left no will. His ashes are interred in St. Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide, Australia beside a pew dedicated in his name.
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> <br> James R. Moore teaches the history of science at Open University in the United Kingdom. <br/>