Book review: The Wright stuff

✍ Scribed by John Beatty

• Book ID: 104638894
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 522 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-3867
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00141010

✦ Synopsis

Sewall Wright has answered some pretty demanding critics, for example, R. A. Fisher and Ernst Mayr, in his long and productive life. But no one has held him more accountable for his views than his biographer, William Provine. Over the course of the last decade, during 120 hours of taped interviews, and in who-knows-how-much correspondence, Wright has responded to Provine's penetrating questions about, comments upon, and criticisms of his work. The result of this collaboration is required reading not only for historians of evolutionary biology, but also for anyone interested in the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the discipline.

The all-too-common view of Wright is one that associates him with a rather narrow view of the evolutionary process, one that attributes extreme importance to chance factors in evolution and that neglects the role of natural selection. Wright's archrival, Fisher, contributed in no small way to this caricature. Even among those who get Wright's views on evolution straight, however, there are still those who minimize the breadth and depth of his researches. This is unfortunate, for to characterize Wright's scientific contributions solely in terms of his theory of the respective roles of chance and natural selection in evolution is akin to characterizing the scientific contributions of the multitalented Fisher in the same misleadingly minimal way. Provine's biography goes a long way toward correcting this tendency.

As Provine documents and explains with care, Wright was much more than just an evolutionary biologist. Perhaps first and foremost, he was a student of the physiology of gene action. For a long time, he and Richard Goldschmidt were the most influential of those biologists who tried to understand how genes work rather than just how genes are transmitted from parents to offspring. The very real difficulties of this sort of work in the period before the identity and structure of the hereditary material were known, coupled with the subsequent emphasis of historians on the successes of transmission genetics in that period, has hindered recognition of the early existence of a rather substantial body of research into so-called "physiological genetics." Provine brings that work to life.

Prior to Wright, much transmission-genetic analysis had involved positing one gene for one trait in order to explain how parents with particular traits could give rise to a group of offspring with a particular distribution of those traits. A somewhat more complicated sort of transmission-genetic analysis had involved positing multiple genes for a trait in order to explain how parents with particular traits could give rise to