Raphael Weldon

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Walter Frank Raphael Weldon
Oxford University
Academic advisorsFrancis Maitland Balfour

Walter Frank Raphael Weldon

biometry. He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson
.

Family

Weldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist, Walter Weldon, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883, Weldon married Florence Tebb (1858–1936), daughter of the social reformer William Tebb.

Life and education

Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at

E. Ray Lankester and the mathematician Olaus Henrici. In the following year he transferred to King's College London and then to St John's College, Cambridge in 1878.[1]

There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist

Naples Zoological Station
to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms.

On his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic.[2] He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.

Career

Oxford University Museum

Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in Invertebrate Morphology. Weldon's work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms.

In 1889 Weldon succeeded Lankester in the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at

Romanes
and others.

His interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation. He began using the statistical techniques that

Oxford University in 1899. In the years of their collaboration Pearson laid the foundations of modern statistics. Magnello emphasises this side of Weldon's career. In 1900 he took the DSc degree and as Linacre Professor he also held a Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.[5]

Weldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional selection in natural populations.[6]

By 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon, Galton and Karl Pearson 'For the Purpose of conducting Statistical Enquiry into the Variability of Organisms'. In an 1894 paper Some remarks on variation in plants and animals arising from the work of the Royal Society Committee, Weldon wrote:

"... the questions raised by the Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method is the only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally checked."

In 1900 the work of

Will Provine gives a detailed account of the controversy.[7] The debate lost much of its intensity with the death of Weldon in 1906, though the general debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued until the creation of the modern evolutionary synthesis
in the 1930s.

After his death, the Weldon Memorial Prize was established by the University of Oxford in his honour; it is awarded annually.

Weldon's dice

In 1894, Weldon rolled a set of 12 dice 26,306 times.[8] He collected the data in part, 'to judge whether the differences between a series of group frequencies and a theoretical law, taken as a whole, were or were not more than might be attributed to the chance fluctuations of random sampling.' Weldon's dice data were used by Karl Pearson[9] in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic.

Notes

  1. ^ "Weldon, Walter Frank Raphael (WLDN878WF)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. . He was through the many years the present writer knew him, like his hero Huxley, a confirmed Agnostic.
  3. ^ Bourne, Gilbert Charles. "Weldon Walter Frank Raphael". Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 Supplement. 3.
  4. ^ "On the Origin of Our Specimens: The Weldon Years | UCL Museums & Collections Blog". blogs.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 November 2017.
  5. ^ Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 5.
  6. ^ Amitabh, Joshi. (2017). Weldon's Search for a Direct Proof of Natural Selection and the Tortuous Path to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Resonance 22 (6): 525-548.
  7. ^ W.B. Provine (1971). The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.
  8. ^ Kemp, A.W., and C.D. Kemp. (1991). Weldon's dice data revisited, The American Statistician, 45(3):216–222. doi:10.2307/2684294
  9. ^ Pearson, Karl (1900). On the criterion that a given system of derivations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. Philosophical Magazine, 5(50), 157–175.

References

External links