Born: 21-Dec-1889, died March 3 1988

Birthplace: Melrose, Massachusetts,

American
He did heaps of mathematics with his father,
eventually started a course in biology at
Lombard college after high school.
He got his doctorate in zoology
at Harvard University (Sc.D., 1915)
Married Louise Lane Williams and had
three children.
After retiring: wrote 4 volumes of Evolution
and the Genetics of Population
genetic drift (Sewall Wright effect) -> crux of
his work
It is the change of allele frequencies in a
population due to chance. [picture]
According to genetic drift, in small,
randomly mating populations gene
frequencies are found to fluctuate purely
by chance-> fitness levels dont
matter. Smaller the population, larger will
be the fluctuation in gene frequency.

Eg of cats
In large populations can assume
fAA=E(fAA) ,etc. but not for small
populations (due to genetic drift, chance),
so in larger populations, genetic drift is
less influencial. [graph]
Wrights theories are in contrast with the
Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium [may involve
inbreeding and does involve small
populations]. In Hardy-Weinberg
equilibrium, allele frequencies do not
change.
So due to all this he was given the
National Medal of Science and the Darwin
medal in 1966 (amongst various other
awards) for his ground breaking
accomplishments in population genetics.