"Before meeting with Weldon... Pearson had grown into a social Darwinist anxious to provide his particular form of Darwinism with a proper scientific basis, and to show that Darwin's ideas and socialism were complementary, and not opposed, as had been maintained by several leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Biometry offered him the chance of pursuing these ends. Moreover... Pearson's conception of 'properly scientific'... was one that made it probable that the development of biometry... would yield a harvest of statistical methods. Statistics, thus formed, embodied the central tenets of Pearson's philosophy of science, and, as such, was to be universally recommended."