Evolutionary genetics / edited by D.L. Jameson.

Date:
[1977], ©1977
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Evolutionary genetics / edited by D.L. Jameson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Editor's Comments on Papers 72 Through 79 J. B. S. Haldane, who, in a series of papers from 1924 to 1933, devel¬ oped a Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection. Part IV appears in the Benchmark volume Demographic Genetics, Part V appears in the Benchmark volume Stochastic Models in Population Genetics and and Part VI appears in the Benchmark volume Genetics of Speciation. Parts I, II, and III are presented here in their entirety as Papers 15,16, and 17. In the initial paper (1924, Paper 15) developing a mathematical theory of selection, Haldane considered first a single completely dom¬ inant allele with random breeding, constant selection intensity, and nonoverlapping generations. He then considered self-fertilization, with¬ in family selection, sex-limited and sex-linked characters. Haldane noted that selection is ineffective on rare recessive characters which may explain why there are so many deleterious autosomal recessive characters. Haldane suggested four circumstances under which selection of récessives may be more effective: self-fertilization, assortative fertili¬ zation, incomplete dominance, and heterozygote advantage. He noted that the isolation of small communities deserved study, a position arrived at independently by Wright. In Part II Haldane (Paper 16) dealt with partial self-fertilization and partial inbreeding and in Part III (Paper 17) he considered partial dominance, multiple factors, linkage, and polyploidy. The remaining papers in this series are discussed in Part IV of this volume. Clearly Haldane felt that the essential elements of the mathematical theory required detailed analysis with clear assumptions before the more ele¬ gant possibilities of gene interaction could be discerned. J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was a man of diverse interests and enormous talents, contributing to mathematics, biochemistry, physiol¬ ogy, literature, and philosophy. He was educated at Oxford in mathe¬ matics and classics, served in the First World War, and returned to study at Oxford before becoming a reader in biochemistry at Cambridge. In 1932 he began an association with University College in London which included occupying the Weldon Chair of Biometry. In 1957 he went to India, where he remained active until his death. He served in the Spanish Civil War, and during World War II he studied the physiology of human respiration during military submarine disasters, and worked in civil defense. For some years he was a member of the Communist Party. M. J. D. White (1965), his biographer for GeA7ei/c5, suggests that he was the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of the century (p. 6). Pirie (1966) provides a bibliography. In addition to the work summarized in this volume, Haldane contributed to genetic studies of the intensity of selection, and various aspects of genetic load, coadaptation, mutation, statistics, and enzymology, and to a wide spec¬ trum of knowledge including the solar system, atomic warfare (1939), 159