Karl Pearson Quotes

Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiased by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.

Knowledge is the equipment which the trained mind can find for itself, but the training is a thing you have got to provide for it

The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification—judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind—essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.

When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed. What is this but saying that the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

Her statistics were more than a study... For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief—that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator—to say nothing of the politician—too often failed for want of this knowledge.

Science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind. […] In truth, the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world.

I will not underrate the importance [of equipment]... But I insist that the trained mind is the first thing, and for scouting a fool on horseback is worth less than a wise man on foot.

If I have put the case of science at all correctly, the reader will have recognised that modern science does much more than demand that it shall be left in undisturbed possession of what the theologian and metaphysician please to term its 'legitimate field'. It claims that the whole range of phenomena, mental as well as physical-the entire universe-is its field. It asserts that the scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole region of knowledge.

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the Huxley Medal. When one is old, one wants no encouragement and one goes on with one's work to the extent of one's power, because it has become habitual.

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not.

The starting point of Darwin's theory of evolution is precisely the existence of those differences between individual members of a race or species which morphologists for the most part rightly neglect. The first condition necessary, in order that any process of Natural Selection may begin among a race, or species, is the existence of differences among its members; and the first step in an enquiry into the possible effect of a selective process upon any character of a race must be an estimate of the frequency with which individuals, exhibiting any given degree of abnormality with respect to that, character, occur. The unit, with which such an enquiry must deal, is not an individual but a race, or a statistically representative sample of a race; and the result must take the form of a numerical statement, showing the relative frequency with which the various kinds of individuals composing the race occur.

Do not expect to hear of any system or method on my part ; time seems too short and the world too vast for that! I rush from science to philosophy, and from philosophy to our old friends the poets; and then, over-wearied by too much idealism, I fancy I become practical in returning to science. Have you ever attempted to conceive all there is in the world worth knowing—that not one subject in the universe is unworthy of study? The giants of literature, the mysteries of many-dimensional space, the attempts of Boltzmann and Crookes to penetrate Nature's very laboratory, the Kantian theory of the universe, and the latest discoveries in embryology, with their wonderful tales of the development of life—what an immensity beyond our grasp!

The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification-judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind-essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.

Women tended to be more docile and patient, so went the belief, and could be depended upon more than men to check and recheck the accuracy of their calculations. A typical picture of the Galton Biometrical Laboratory under Karl Pearson would have Pearson and several men walking around, looking at output from the computers or discussing deep mathematical ideas, while all about them rows of women were computing.

There are many signs that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists.

Karl Pearson, Galton’s principal biographer and an outstanding mathematician himself, observed that Galton had created “a revolution in our scientific ideas [that] has modified our philosophy of science and even of life itself.”40 Pearson did not exaggerate: regression to the mean is dynamite. Galton transformed the notion of probability from a static concept based on randomness and the Law of Large Numbers into a dynamic process in which the successors to the outliers are predestined to join the crowd at the center. Change and motion from the outer limits toward the center are constant, inevitable, foreseeable.