Walter Frank Raphael Weldon
FRS (15 March 1860 – 13 April 1906), was an English
evolutionary biologist
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life for ...
and a founder of
biometry
Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...
. 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
Walter Weldon FRS FRSE (31 October 183220 September 1885) was a 19th-century English industrial chemist and journalist. He was President of the Society of Chemical Industry 1883/84.
Life
He was born in Loughborough on 31 October 1832, the son ...
, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883, Weldon married Florence Tebb, daughter of the social reformer
William Tebb
William Tebb (22 October 1830 – 23 January 1917) was a British businessman and wide-ranging Reform movement, social reformer. He was an anti-vaccinationist and author of anti-vaccination books.''Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in E ...
.
Life and education
Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at
University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = ...
. Among his teachers were the zoologist
E. Ray Lankester and the mathematician
Olaus Henrici
Olaus Magnus Friedrich Erdmann Henrici, FRS (9 March 1840, Meldorf, Duchy of Holstein – 10 August 1918, Chandler's Ford, Hampshire, England) was a German mathematician who became a professor in London.
After three years as an apprentice in en ...
. In the following year he transferred to
King's College London and then to
St John's College, Cambridge in 1878.
There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist
Francis Balfour who influenced him greatly; Weldon gave up his plans for a career in medicine. In 1881 he gained a first-class honours degree in the Natural Science Tripos; in the autumn he left for the
Naples Zoological Station to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms.
On his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic. He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.
Career
Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in
Invertebrate
Invertebrates are a paraphyletic group of animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''backbone'' or ''spine''), derived from the notochord. This is a grouping including all animals apart from the chordate ...
Morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
. 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
University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = ...
, and as curator of what is now the
Grant Museum of Zoology, and was elected to the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
in 1890. Royal Society records show his election supporters included the great zoologists of the day:
Huxley, Lankester,
Poulton,
Newton,
Flower
A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants (plants of the division Angiospermae). The biological function of a flower is to facilitate reproduction, usually by providing a mechani ...
,
Romanes and others.
His interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation. He began using the statistical techniques that
Francis Galton had developed for he had come to the view that "the problem of animal evolution is essentially a statistical problem." Weldon began working with his University College colleague, the mathematician
Karl Pearson. Their partnership was very important to both men and survived Weldon's move to the
Linacre Chair of Zoology
The position of Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford was founded in 1860, initially as the Linacre Professorship of Physiology and then as the chair of Human and Comparative Anatomy, although its origins can be traced back a fur ...
at
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to th ...
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.
Weldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional
selection
Selection may refer to:
Science
* Selection (biology), also called natural selection, selection in evolution
** Sex selection, in genetics
** Mate selection, in mating
** Sexual selection in humans, in human sexuality
** Human mating strateg ...
in natural populations.
By 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon,
Galton
Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto- ...
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
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel, OSA (; cs, Řehoř Jan Mendel; 20 July 1822 – 6 January 1884) was a biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brünn (''Brno''), Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was ...
was rediscovered and this precipitated a conflict between Weldon and Pearson on the one side and
William Bateson
William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscove ...
on the other. Bateson, who had been taught by Weldon, took a very strong line against the biometricians. This bitter dispute ranged across substantive issues of the nature of
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
and methodological issues such as the value of the statistical method.
Will Provine gives a detailed account of the controversy. 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
The Weldon Memorial Prize, also known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is given yearly by the University of Oxford. The prize is to be awarded
without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgeme ...
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. 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
[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.] in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic.
Notes
References
*
*
W.B. Provine
William Ball Provine (February 19, 1942 – September 1, 2015) was an American historian of science and of evolutionary biology and population genetics. He was the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell Universi ...
(1971) The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.
*Magnello E. 2001. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, in ''Statisticians of the Centuries'' (eds C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta) p261-264. New York: Springer.
*Shipley A.E. 1908. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. ''Proc Roy Soc Series B'' 1908 vol 80 pxxv-xli.
External links
*
*
*
"On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas"Proceedings of the Royal Society, 54, (1893), 318–329. An example of Weldon's use of statistical methods
Photograph of Weldonon th
page.
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weldon, Walter Frank Raphael
Evolutionary biologists
English agnostics
English statisticians
English zoologists
Biostatisticians
Fellows of the Royal Society
Academics of University College London
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge
Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
Alumni of University College London
Alumni of King's College London
1860 births
1906 deaths
Deaths from pneumonia in England
Linacre Professors of Zoology
People from Highgate
Jodrell Professors of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy