Sewall Wright

Sewall Green Wright ForMemRS HonFRSE (December 21, 1889 March 3, 1988¹) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a founder of population genetics alongside Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, which was a major step in the development of the modern synthesis combining genetics with evolution. He discovered the inbreeding coefficient and methods of computing it in pedigree animals. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding between members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and along with Fisher he pioneered methods for computing the distribution of gene frequencies among populations as a result of the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration and genetic drift. Wright also made major contributions to mammalian and biochemical genetics.

Sewall Green Wright ForMemRS HonFRSE (December 21, 1889 March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a founder of population genetics alongside Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, which was a major step in the development of the modern synthesis combining genetics with evolution. He discovered the inbreeding coefficient and methods of computing it in pedigree animals. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding between members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and along with Fisher he pioneered methods for computing the distribution of gene frequencies among populations as a result of the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration and genetic drift. Wright also made major contributions to mammalian and biochemical genetics. ==Biography== Sewall Wright was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, to Philip Green Wright and Elizabeth Quincy Sewall Wright. His parents were first cousins, an interesting fact in light of Wright's later research on inbreeding. The family moved three years later after Philip accepted a teaching job at Lombard College, a Universalist college in Galesburg, Illinois. As a child, Wright helped his father and brother print and publish an early book of poems by his father's student Carl Sandburg. At the age of seven, in 1897, he wrote his first "book", entitled Wonders of Nature, and he published his last paper in 1988: he can be claimed, therefore, to be the scientist with the longest career of science writing. Wright's astonishing maturity at the age of seven may be judged from the following excerpt quoted in the obituary: Have you ever examined the gizzard of a fowl? The gizzard of a fowl is a deep red colar with blu at the top. First on the outside is a very thick muscle. Under this is a white and fleecy layer. Holding very tight to the other. I expect you know that chickens eat sand. The next two layers are rough and rumply. These layers hold the sand. They grind the food. One night when we had company we had chicken-pie. Our Aunt Polly cut open the gizzard, and in it we found a lot of grain, and some corn. He was the oldest of three gifted brothers—the others being the aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. From an early age Wright had a love and talent for mathematics and biology. Wright attended Galesburg High School and graduated in 1906. He then enrolled in Lombard College where his father taught, to study mathematics. He was influenced greatly by Professor Wilhelmine Key, one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in biology. Wright received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he worked at the Bussey Institute with the pioneering mammalian geneticist William Ernest Castle investigating the inheritance of coat colors in mammals. He worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture until 1925, when he joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago. He remained there until his retirement in 1955, when he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received many honors in his long career, including the National Medal of Science (1966), the Balzan Prize (1984), and the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1980). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. The American Mathematical Society selected him as the Josiah Willards Gibbs lecturer for 1941. For his work on genetics of evolutionary processes, Wright was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1945. He died in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 3, 1988. ===Family=== Wright married Louise Lane Williams (1895–1975) in 1921. They had three children: Richard, Robert, and Elizabeth. Sewall Wright worshipped as a Unitarian. ==Scientific achievements and credits== ===Wright and philosophy=== Wright was one of the few geneticists of his time to venture into philosophy. He found a union of concept in Charles Hartshorne, who became a lifelong friend and philosophical collaborator. Wright endorsed a form of panpsychism. He believed that the birth of the consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, therefore implying these properties were in the most elementary particles. ==Legacy== Wright and Fisher, along with J. B. S. Haldane, were the key figures in the modern synthesis that brought genetics and evolution together. Their work was essential to the contributions of Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson, Julian Huxley, and Stebbins. The modern synthesis was the most important development in evolutionary biology after Darwin. Wright also had a major effect on the development of mammalian genetics and biochemical genetics. Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie's The Book of Why (2018) describes the contribution of Wright's work on path analysis and delays in its acceptance by several technical disciplines (specifically statistics and formal causal analysis). OpenMx has as its icon a representation of Wright's piebald guinea pig. ==Bibliography== vol. 1, Genetic & Biometric Foundations. vol. 2, Theory of Gene Frequencies. vol. 3, Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions. vol. 4, Variability within and Among Natural Populations. ==References== ==Further reading== Ghiselin, Michael T. (1997) Metaphysics and the Origin of Species. NY: SUNY Press. Wright 1934, "The Method of Path Coefficients", Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 5: 161-215 Wright 1983, "Path Analysis in Genetic Epidemiology: A Critique" ==External links== Sewall Wright: Darwin's Successor—Evolutionary Theorist by Edric Lescouflair and James F. Crow Sewall Wright Papers at the American Philosophical Society

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