… the best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense. - Ronald Fisher

No, I cannot believe in the light of this speech that the reward of Lysenko's triumphant career is the advance of scientific knowledge; nor that it is the prosperity of poor peasants. The reward he is so eagerly grasping is Power, power for himself, power to threaten, power to torture, power to kill.

(Coining phrase "null hypothesis") In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the “null hypothesis,” and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

[We are now] in a position to judge of the validity of the objection which has been made, that the principle of Natural Selection depends on a succession of favourable chances. The objection is more in the nature of an innuendo than of a criticism, for it depends for its force upon the ambiguity of the word chance, in its popular uses. The income derived from a Casino by its proprietor may, in one sense, be said to depend upon a succession of favourable chances, although the phrase contains a suggestion of improbability more appropriate to the hopes of the patrons of his establishment. It is easy without any very profound logical analysis to perceive the difference between a succession of favourable deviations from the laws of chance, and on the other hand, the continuous and cumulative action of these laws. It is on the latter that the principle of Natural Selection relies.