ASA Connect

Hi Robert,

I loved reading you note and disagree with you.  The response that keeps running through my mind is: Would Fisher want his daughter to marry one?

Then I remembered that his daughter ended up married to a Box.

I expand with a personal story:

I was a member of the first Yale graduate statistics class that entered in 1963.  I was accepted for that class even though I was a Penn State engineer whose statistics background was a single undergraduate statistics course.  While I enjoyed my time at Yale, the very mathematical department was not a good match for my skills and interests.  I left after two years with a masters obtained with the minimum passing grade (1 honors, 1 pass and the rest high passes).  I did not know that the faculty recommendations that I had received, particularly Frank Anscombe's, were so poor that the only job offer I received was from DuPont's Applied Statistics Group (ASG) where I was Don Marquardt's (1986 ASA President) first outside hire.  Therefore, I became a statistician instead of working in the financial industry as I had originally planned.  I was told, years later, that a reason for my hire was that if I inspired such large negative emotion in pure academics that I could be a worthwhile hire for the ASG.  I am sure that the phrase "those turkeys" was also used.  I also note that I was chosen over Bruce Hoadley who was receiving his Berkley PhD at the time.  Bruce would have accepted an offer because beside having a great ASG, Dupont also had exceptional employee golf facilities and Bruce was a great golfer.  My hiring could show the great certification power of an Ivy League degree above that of a degree from a good state school.

Yale was a very Fisherian place at that time and I credit Fisher for determining the direction of my research.  I am a great fan of Versalius who made foundational discoveries in anatomy because he was among the first to perform dissections himself.  A Fisherian quote from Yale that I remember is: "Quality might have a modicum of interest at the lowest levels of the production process."  Because of this Fisherian quote, and because of my contrarian nature, I decided that research in quality could be fruitful. Quality research has turned out to be a fruitful and fun endeavor for my entire career.  I enjoy toiling in the backwaters of science, where, aside from making scientific advances, I get the fun of answering subdomain statistical leaders, reviewers of my latest submission, who stated: "The paper is written in a style that is much too informal and conversational."  They also stated: "There needs to be a distinction between events and counts of events. The authors refer to all observations as counts,"  and who then ask "Given that OoM/2 and OoM correspond to a 5-fold and 10-fold shift, respectively, I wonder why 2OoM relates to a 100- fold (and not to a 20-fold as I would expect)."  The first response was written by the academic reviewer who, apparently, did not approve of our response to the second question that was contained along our revision as: "We do not feel that this is very important.  Why aren't events counts?"  Of course, he, an excellent academic, responded with quote one that is essentially the same comment in an unanswerable form.  The third question will get the response: "If you start with a meter stick and go 30 OoM each way, you go from sub-atomic particles to the size of galaxies."  We note that it can be hard work to get statistics papers with a scientific component published when the reviewers are very mathematical types with little scientific understanding.

In 1998 my presentation at the ASA annual meetings, that was originally titled "The Racist Scumbag Approach to Sociological Research" was, at the ASA's request, retitled "A Racist Factor in Sociological Research."  It discussed the "evidence" for the observed difference in black-white IQ test scores.  Eugenic reasoning can be found in much of the "evidence."  This brings us back to the main topic of this email.  Today, as American Cities are tearing down statues of confederate generals, because of their support of slavery and of racist ideology, we are discussing whether to  rename a lecture after a smart black guy, who was one of the very few blacks in our profession, or to keep it named after an eugenicist who espoused many racist ideas.  Why there are so few blacks in the Statistics Profession is an interesting question that has seldom been examined.  Now is a good time for that question to be examined and acted upon.  Your argument for not renaming the lecture can be paraphrased as Fisher was smart, had influential publications and was no more racist than many of his contemporaries.  I consider the fact that he flouted his racist ideas in eugenic publications to be a crucial point.  His, supposedly equally racist, contemporaries did not publicize their racist ideas to the extent that Fisher did.  Therefore, I believe that the lecture should be renamed.

The operational question is:  Who determines the name of the Blackwell/Fisher Lecture?  Are we spinning our wheels and exerting effort that will have no effect?  Who has the naming power?  Are your clearly expressed wishes the determining power?  What is the process for making a name change?

And Bob, could you detect a whiff of condescension, perhaps a teeny tiny whiff, in the revised 1951 UNESCO statement: "You dummies can also participate in civilization" that Fisher wanted?  In my 1998 ASA presentation, one slide stated:

Testing Hypothesis

1. Genetic Black-White Difference is – 15 points
2. Environmental Black-White Difference is -15 points
3. Environmental Black-White Difference is -30 points and the Genetic Black-White Difference is +15 points

All Hypotheses Would give Exactly the same Data;

There is No Way to Distinguish Between Them.

James M. Lucas

To the assembled:

The naming, or rather the elimination of naming, the Lectureship in honor of RA Fisher, has become a cause célèbre among ASA members.  I found many comments in this thread troublesome: Some, for their careless scholarship; others, for their false assertions.  Consequently, I should like to make a few remarks of my own.

As I do not know any of these contributors, it is unclear what their areas of expertise are.  For this reason, I would like to make mine known.  I am trained academically across several fields.  For the last 35 years and until my retirement, I was an applied biostatistician and taught many and varied undergraduate and graduate courses in quantitative methods and statistics, mathematics, psychology and behavior, and genetics.  My own research has examined the effects of various genetic abnormalities that produce intellectual disabilities and/or autism.

I wish to address my concerns primarily to those who oppose the naming of the lectureship after RA Fisher, First, to Daniela Witten's sequence of jejune tweets. As a social movement, eugenics rose to popularity during the late 19^th to early mid-20^th century.  The founder of the Eugenics Society in England was Sir Francis Galton, s polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton's interest in eugenics came about from his conversations with his cousin about evolution, with its assumption of adaptability to circumstances to survival of the fittest, and his own research on twins and ability.  The phrase, "survival of the fittest" was not Darwin's.  It was first used by the sociologist, Herbert Spencer, after Darwin's work was published.  The concept has fallen into disuse, and correctly so.  Fisher's work on Mendelian inheritance using his analysis of variance with unordered pairs, published in Biometrika in 1918, provided the groundwork for subsequent statistical models that partitioned the effects of genetics and environment on behavioral features such as cognitive function and temperament.  They continue to be used in twin studies to this day.  Open any volume of the journal, Behavior Genetics, published in last 50 years.

Unlike Witten, Fisher was aware of the importance of the relationship between genetics and behavior, and the historical precedents for their association. Eugenics, meaning well born, has been used by social groups for millennia.  Horses and cows were bred for their physical and behavioral characteristics for 10,000 years, as have dogs and birds.  Fisher's agricultural research and experimental design stand as monuments in this regard. His tome, The General Theory of Natural Selection, was an attempt to explain heredity by integrating what was known at the time about genetics with what was known about statistics.  Fisher's UNESCO remark in 1951 cited by O'Brian was based on the evidence compiled previously by Galton and others.  Hardly what one might call "terrible things."

The Eugenics movement, begun and promoted by Galton, and by Galton's disciple, Karl Pearson, was based on demographic data of the period.  England's upper classes were reproducing at lower rates than were the poor and working classes. As described by the historians Gibbon and William McNeil, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was attributed to upper class lethargy and lower reproduction rates.  Britain was at the height of its empire and Galton's eugenic movement sought to stem the decline that visited Rome.  He even offered a substantial prize for certain upper class members to marry and produce offspring.

It should be noted that the movement in England did not seek to eliminate races – a most unfortunate anthropological term that sadly persists to this day – via genocide, but to halt reproduction of individuals who were considered unfit.  Unlike what took place in America and elsewhere in the world, the British Eugenics Society sought to convince Parliament to make available voluntary sterilization (See Macnicol's article, "The Voluntary Sterilization Campaign in Britain, 1918-39").  As a member of upper class England, Fisher saw eugenics as a class issue, not a race issue.

In the US, laws passed in Virginia and 31 other states, and affirmed in a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court, mandated sterilization of unfit individuals. As a result, more than 60,000 men and women were sterilized, mainly poor Italian, Japanese, and Mexican women residing in California. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller contributed financial support for the American eugenics movement through their respective foundations; so did John-Maynard Keynes in England.  In his Mein Kampf, Hitler applauded the Americans for their efforts at removing unfit individuals and used the American model to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.

Yes, symbols do matter, but to put forth the false equivalence of Confederate general's statues – they were, after all, traitors who fought and killed in a bloody war to retain slaves as economic chattel – with Fisher's support of a voluntary eugenics movement in England is an inapt comparison.

Emma Benn's comments, that "Fisher, Galton, and others openly expressed beliefs that Blacks and other racial groups were inferior to Whites," is not true as stated.  While it can be said of Galton – he specifically makes comments to this effect in Hereditary Genius – and Karl Pearson, a rabid anti-Semite and avid Nazi supporter, I defy Ms. Benn to find published remarks made by Fisher in this regard.  Painting with such a broad brush diminishes the painter.

Although many of his comments are historically correct, Dominic Lusinchi misses the mark on two occasions. His statement "Many of the founders of the modern field of statistics (mostly in Britain) were eugenicists," has it backwards.  It was following his statistical work with twins published in 1875, that Galton founded the eugenics society.  And, Lusinchi's statement, "Eugenics, perhaps not in so many words, is still with us: …{in the} book "The Bell Curve"," was not about eugenics but was racist; and, was successfully rebutted with the help of the statistician, Stephen Feinberg, in the book entitled "Intelligence, Genes and Success." If one is looking to identify eugenics in late 20^th century, one need look no further than India's sterilization policy or China's one-child policy.

The most important comment is made by Stephen Elston, and it has nothing to do with the naming of the lectureship, his opposition to naming the award after Fisher notwithstanding.  His remark, "I only need only to look at the faces in my own classes to see that there are far too few US born women and people of color in the seats," gets to the heart of the problem no other statistician in this discussion was prepared to confront.  That is, no feel-good symbol will replace the dysfunctional, segregated US education system that starts at K-12 and continues to the college and post-graduate level.  For too many decades, American school systems failed to deliver coherent quantitative and mathematical curricula with trained teachers who actually know how to instruct students how to solve problems which is, after all, what statisticians do.  If the ASA membership want to help provide a solution, they can begin by identifying the educational deserts in their respective back yards, and seek to develop and support by any means AP Statistics courses in high schools where none exist.

When ASA gets behind any movement to attend to this barrier, I'll be more than happy to assist.

Hi Robert,

I loved reading you note and disagree with you.  The response that keeps running through my mind is: Would Fisher want his daughter to marry one?

Then I remembered that his daughter ended up married to a Box.

I expand with a personal story:

I was a member of the first Yale graduate statistics class that entered in 1963.  I was accepted for that class even though I was a Penn State engineer whose statistics background was a single undergraduate statistics course.  While I enjoyed my time at Yale, the very mathematical department was not a good match for my skills and interests.  I left after two years with a masters obtained with the minimum passing grade (1 honors, 1 pass and the rest high passes).  I did not know that the faculty recommendations that I had received, particularly Frank Anscombe's, were so poor that the only job offer I received was from DuPont's Applied Statistics Group (ASG) where I was Don Marquardt's (1986 ASA President) first outside hire.  Therefore, I became a statistician instead of working in the financial industry as I had originally planned.  I was told, years later, that a reason for my hire was that if I inspired such large negative emotion in pure academics that I could be a worthwhile hire for the ASG.  I am sure that the phrase "those turkeys" was also used.  I also note that I was chosen over Bruce Hoadley who was receiving his Berkley PhD at the time.  Bruce would have accepted an offer because beside having a great ASG, Dupont also had exceptional employee golf facilities and Bruce was a great golfer.  My hiring could show the great certification power of an Ivy League degree above that of a degree from a good state school.

Yale was a very Fisherian place at that time and I credit Fisher for determining the direction of my research.  I am a great fan of Versalius who made foundational discoveries in anatomy because he was among the first to perform dissections himself.  A Fisherian quote from Yale that I remember is: "Quality might have a modicum of interest at the lowest levels of the production process."  Because of this Fisherian quote, and because of my contrarian nature, I decided that research in quality could be fruitful. Quality research has turned out to be a fruitful and fun endeavor for my entire career.  I enjoy toiling in the backwaters of science, where, aside from making scientific advances, I get the fun of answering subdomain statistical leaders, reviewers of my latest submission, who stated: "The paper is written in a style that is much too informal and conversational."  They also stated: "There needs to be a distinction between events and counts of events. The authors refer to all observations as counts,"  and who then ask "Given that OoM/2 and OoM correspond to a 5-fold and 10-fold shift, respectively, I wonder why 2OoM relates to a 100- fold (and not to a 20-fold as I would expect)."  The first response was written by the academic reviewer who, apparently, did not approve of our response to the second question that was contained along our revision as: "We do not feel that this is very important.  Why aren't events counts?"  Of course, he, an excellent academic, responded with quote one that is essentially the same comment in an unanswerable form.  The third question will get the response: "If you start with a meter stick and go 30 OoM each way, you go from sub-atomic particles to the size of galaxies."  We note that it can be hard work to get statistics papers with a scientific component published when the reviewers are very mathematical types with little scientific understanding.

In 1998 my presentation at the ASA annual meetings, that was originally titled "The Racist Scumbag Approach to Sociological Research" was, at the ASA's request, retitled "A Racist Factor in Sociological Research."  It discussed the "evidence" for the observed difference in black-white IQ test scores.  Eugenic reasoning can be found in much of the "evidence."  This brings us back to the main topic of this email.  Today, as American Cities are tearing down statues of confederate generals, because of their support of slavery and of racist ideology, we are discussing whether to  rename a lecture after a smart black guy, who was one of the very few blacks in our profession, or to keep it named after an eugenicist who espoused many racist ideas.  Why there are so few blacks in the Statistics Profession is an interesting question that has seldom been examined.  Now is a good time for that question to be examined and acted upon.  Your argument for not renaming the lecture can be paraphrased as Fisher was smart, had influential publications and was no more racist than many of his contemporaries.  I consider the fact that he flouted his racist ideas in eugenic publications to be a crucial point.  His, supposedly equally racist, contemporaries did not publicize their racist ideas to the extent that Fisher did.  Therefore, I believe that the lecture should be renamed.

The operational question is:  Who determines the name of the Blackwell/Fisher Lecture?  Are we spinning our wheels and exerting effort that will have no effect?  Who has the naming power?  Are your clearly expressed wishes the determining power?  What is the process for making a name change?

And Bob, could you detect a whiff of condescension, perhaps a teeny tiny whiff, in the revised 1951 UNESCO statement: "You dummies can also participate in civilization" that Fisher wanted?  In my 1998 ASA presentation, one slide stated:

Testing Hypothesis

1. Genetic Black-White Difference is – 15 points
2. Environmental Black-White Difference is -15 points
3. Environmental Black-White Difference is -30 points and the Genetic Black-White Difference is +15 points

All Hypotheses Would give Exactly the same Data;

There is No Way to Distinguish Between Them.

James M. Lucas

To the assembled:

The naming, or rather the elimination of naming, the Lectureship in honor of RA Fisher, has become a cause célèbre among ASA members.  I found many comments in this thread troublesome: Some, for their careless scholarship; others, for their false assertions.  Consequently, I should like to make a few remarks of my own.

As I do not know any of these contributors, it is unclear what their areas of expertise are.  For this reason, I would like to make mine known.  I am trained academically across several fields.  For the last 35 years and until my retirement, I was an applied biostatistician and taught many and varied undergraduate and graduate courses in quantitative methods and statistics, mathematics, psychology and behavior, and genetics.  My own research has examined the effects of various genetic abnormalities that produce intellectual disabilities and/or autism.

I wish to address my concerns primarily to those who oppose the naming of the lectureship after RA Fisher, First, to Daniela Witten's sequence of jejune tweets. As a social movement, eugenics rose to popularity during the late 19^th to early mid-20^th century.  The founder of the Eugenics Society in England was Sir Francis Galton, s polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton's interest in eugenics came about from his conversations with his cousin about evolution, with its assumption of adaptability to circumstances to survival of the fittest, and his own research on twins and ability.  The phrase, "survival of the fittest" was not Darwin's.  It was first used by the sociologist, Herbert Spencer, after Darwin's work was published.  The concept has fallen into disuse, and correctly so.  Fisher's work on Mendelian inheritance using his analysis of variance with unordered pairs, published in Biometrika in 1918, provided the groundwork for subsequent statistical models that partitioned the effects of genetics and environment on behavioral features such as cognitive function and temperament.  They continue to be used in twin studies to this day.  Open any volume of the journal, Behavior Genetics, published in last 50 years.

Unlike Witten, Fisher was aware of the importance of the relationship between genetics and behavior, and the historical precedents for their association. Eugenics, meaning well born, has been used by social groups for millennia.  Horses and cows were bred for their physical and behavioral characteristics for 10,000 years, as have dogs and birds.  Fisher's agricultural research and experimental design stand as monuments in this regard. His tome, The General Theory of Natural Selection, was an attempt to explain heredity by integrating what was known at the time about genetics with what was known about statistics.  Fisher's UNESCO remark in 1951 cited by O'Brian was based on the evidence compiled previously by Galton and others.  Hardly what one might call "terrible things."

The Eugenics movement, begun and promoted by Galton, and by Galton's disciple, Karl Pearson, was based on demographic data of the period.  England's upper classes were reproducing at lower rates than were the poor and working classes. As described by the historians Gibbon and William McNeil, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was attributed to upper class lethargy and lower reproduction rates.  Britain was at the height of its empire and Galton's eugenic movement sought to stem the decline that visited Rome.  He even offered a substantial prize for certain upper class members to marry and produce offspring.

It should be noted that the movement in England did not seek to eliminate races – a most unfortunate anthropological term that sadly persists to this day – via genocide, but to halt reproduction of individuals who were considered unfit.  Unlike what took place in America and elsewhere in the world, the British Eugenics Society sought to convince Parliament to make available voluntary sterilization (See Macnicol's article, "The Voluntary Sterilization Campaign in Britain, 1918-39").  As a member of upper class England, Fisher saw eugenics as a class issue, not a race issue.

In the US, laws passed in Virginia and 31 other states, and affirmed in a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court, mandated sterilization of unfit individuals. As a result, more than 60,000 men and women were sterilized, mainly poor Italian, Japanese, and Mexican women residing in California. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller contributed financial support for the American eugenics movement through their respective foundations; so did John-Maynard Keynes in England.  In his Mein Kampf, Hitler applauded the Americans for their efforts at removing unfit individuals and used the American model to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.

Yes, symbols do matter, but to put forth the false equivalence of Confederate general's statues – they were, after all, traitors who fought and killed in a bloody war to retain slaves as economic chattel – with Fisher's support of a voluntary eugenics movement in England is an inapt comparison.

Emma Benn's comments, that "Fisher, Galton, and others openly expressed beliefs that Blacks and other racial groups were inferior to Whites," is not true as stated.  While it can be said of Galton – he specifically makes comments to this effect in Hereditary Genius – and Karl Pearson, a rabid anti-Semite and avid Nazi supporter, I defy Ms. Benn to find published remarks made by Fisher in this regard.  Painting with such a broad brush diminishes the painter.

Although many of his comments are historically correct, Dominic Lusinchi misses the mark on two occasions. His statement "Many of the founders of the modern field of statistics (mostly in Britain) were eugenicists," has it backwards.  It was following his statistical work with twins published in 1875, that Galton founded the eugenics society.  And, Lusinchi's statement, "Eugenics, perhaps not in so many words, is still with us: …{in the} book "The Bell Curve"," was not about eugenics but was racist; and, was successfully rebutted with the help of the statistician, Stephen Feinberg, in the book entitled "Intelligence, Genes and Success." If one is looking to identify eugenics in late 20^th century, one need look no further than India's sterilization policy or China's one-child policy.

The most important comment is made by Stephen Elston, and it has nothing to do with the naming of the lectureship, his opposition to naming the award after Fisher notwithstanding.  His remark, "I only need only to look at the faces in my own classes to see that there are far too few US born women and people of color in the seats," gets to the heart of the problem no other statistician in this discussion was prepared to confront.  That is, no feel-good symbol will replace the dysfunctional, segregated US education system that starts at K-12 and continues to the college and post-graduate level.  For too many decades, American school systems failed to deliver coherent quantitative and mathematical curricula with trained teachers who actually know how to instruct students how to solve problems which is, after all, what statisticians do.  If the ASA membership want to help provide a solution, they can begin by identifying the educational deserts in their respective back yards, and seek to develop and support by any means AP Statistics courses in high schools where none exist.

When ASA gets behind any movement to attend to this barrier, I'll be more than happy to assist.

Hi Robert,

I loved reading you note and disagree with you.  The response that keeps running through my mind is: Would Fisher want his daughter to marry one?

Then I remembered that his daughter ended up married to a Box.

I expand with a personal story:

I was a member of the first Yale graduate statistics class that entered in 1963.  I was accepted for that class even though I was a Penn State engineer whose statistics background was a single undergraduate statistics course.  While I enjoyed my time at Yale, the very mathematical department was not a good match for my skills and interests.  I left after two years with a masters obtained with the minimum passing grade (1 honors, 1 pass and the rest high passes).  I did not know that the faculty recommendations that I had received, particularly Frank Anscombe's, were so poor that the only job offer I received was from DuPont's Applied Statistics Group (ASG) where I was Don Marquardt's (1986 ASA President) first outside hire.  Therefore, I became a statistician instead of working in the financial industry as I had originally planned.  I was told, years later, that a reason for my hire was that if I inspired such large negative emotion in pure academics that I could be a worthwhile hire for the ASG.  I am sure that the phrase "those turkeys" was also used.  I also note that I was chosen over Bruce Hoadley who was receiving his Berkley PhD at the time.  Bruce would have accepted an offer because beside having a great ASG, Dupont also had exceptional employee golf facilities and Bruce was a great golfer.  My hiring could show the great certification power of an Ivy League degree above that of a degree from a good state school.

Yale was a very Fisherian place at that time and I credit Fisher for determining the direction of my research.  I am a great fan of Versalius who made foundational discoveries in anatomy because he was among the first to perform dissections himself.  A Fisherian quote from Yale that I remember is: "Quality might have a modicum of interest at the lowest levels of the production process."  Because of this Fisherian quote, and because of my contrarian nature, I decided that research in quality could be fruitful. Quality research has turned out to be a fruitful and fun endeavor for my entire career.  I enjoy toiling in the backwaters of science, where, aside from making scientific advances, I get the fun of answering subdomain statistical leaders, reviewers of my latest submission, who stated: "The paper is written in a style that is much too informal and conversational."  They also stated: "There needs to be a distinction between events and counts of events. The authors refer to all observations as counts,"  and who then ask "Given that OoM/2 and OoM correspond to a 5-fold and 10-fold shift, respectively, I wonder why 2OoM relates to a 100- fold (and not to a 20-fold as I would expect)."  The first response was written by the academic reviewer who, apparently, did not approve of our response to the second question that was contained along our revision as: "We do not feel that this is very important.  Why aren't events counts?"  Of course, he, an excellent academic, responded with quote one that is essentially the same comment in an unanswerable form.  The third question will get the response: "If you start with a meter stick and go 30 OoM each way, you go from sub-atomic particles to the size of galaxies."  We note that it can be hard work to get statistics papers with a scientific component published when the reviewers are very mathematical types with little scientific understanding.

In 1998 my presentation at the ASA annual meetings, that was originally titled "The Racist Scumbag Approach to Sociological Research" was, at the ASA's request, retitled "A Racist Factor in Sociological Research."  It discussed the "evidence" for the observed difference in black-white IQ test scores.  Eugenic reasoning can be found in much of the "evidence."  This brings us back to the main topic of this email.  Today, as American Cities are tearing down statues of confederate generals, because of their support of slavery and of racist ideology, we are discussing whether to  rename a lecture after a smart black guy, who was one of the very few blacks in our profession, or to keep it named after an eugenicist who espoused many racist ideas.  Why there are so few blacks in the Statistics Profession is an interesting question that has seldom been examined.  Now is a good time for that question to be examined and acted upon.  Your argument for not renaming the lecture can be paraphrased as Fisher was smart, had influential publications and was no more racist than many of his contemporaries.  I consider the fact that he flouted his racist ideas in eugenic publications to be a crucial point.  His, supposedly equally racist, contemporaries did not publicize their racist ideas to the extent that Fisher did.  Therefore, I believe that the lecture should be renamed.

The operational question is:  Who determines the name of the Blackwell/Fisher Lecture?  Are we spinning our wheels and exerting effort that will have no effect?  Who has the naming power?  Are your clearly expressed wishes the determining power?  What is the process for making a name change?

And Bob, could you detect a whiff of condescension, perhaps a teeny tiny whiff, in the revised 1951 UNESCO statement: "You dummies can also participate in civilization" that Fisher wanted?  In my 1998 ASA presentation, one slide stated:

Testing Hypothesis

1. Genetic Black-White Difference is – 15 points
2. Environmental Black-White Difference is -15 points
3. Environmental Black-White Difference is -30 points and the Genetic Black-White Difference is +15 points

All Hypotheses Would give Exactly the same Data;

There is No Way to Distinguish Between Them.

James M. Lucas