ABSTRACT
Sewall Wright was one of the great trio of the founders of population genetics, the other two being J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher. He wrote a pamphlet, at the age of seven, on natural history, with chapters on marmosets, ants, dinosaurs, and astronomy, and a wren that could not be discouraged from nesting in the family mailbox. Wright continued to analyze the effects of inbreeding and hybridization and at the same time pursued his studies of coat-color inheritance. Three of Wright’s major areas of interest were apparent in the next few years, at Harvard and US Department of Agriculture. These were correlation analysis, animal breeding, and mammalian physiological genetics. Wright’s contribution to the theory of evolution by natural selection, shifting balance theory, was a direct outgrowth of his experience of breeding domestic livestock as well as his experiments with coat color in guinea pigs. Wright’s most important contribution to statistics is his method of path analysis.
