Gustave Malécot, 1911-1998. Population genetics founding father.

IN November 1998 we lost one of the most important cot completed his mathematics degree at the École Normale Superieure in Paris (Nagylaki 1989). Malécot scientists of this century, Gustave Malécot. He was, in the best sense of the words, a great man. His contributold me how he had spent 2 years reading and mastering (no doubt in rigorous mathematical detail) Fisher’s artitions to science and mathematics began 60 years ago and continued until his death. His contributions to cle, at the Institut Henri Poincaré, also in Paris. Nagylaki (1989) describes how Malécot’s dissertation work mathematical population genetics were arguably the most profound of any. If we will admit a fourth member made Fisher’s connection of biometry with Mendelian inheritance more rigorous and general. Specifically, to the “fathers” of population genetics, the others being Sewall Wright, R. A. Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane, it Malécot adopted a conditional expectation approach that foreshadowed his stochastic process approach to would surely have to be Gustave Malécot. It seems safe to say that it was Malécot who first formulated models other problems. Although he respected the fundamental connections that Fisher had made, Malécot also reof population genetics as stochastic processes, in the sense of the term today, for example, as Markov chains. lated to me how he had “found some problems” with the mathematics of Fisher’s theory. Moreover, Malécot’s mathematics were elegant and exact. They were also often compact and abstract. RecogniWhat followed from Malécot’s dissertation is, to my thinking, probably the first of several reasons that Malétion of Malécot’s achievements has at most times been slow, its spread a branching trickle that continues today. cot’s work never received the rapid and widespread recognition it deserved. Although Malécot was not at all His achievements deserve fuller recognition. The purpose of this article is to give a personal perbitter about his career, he related to me on numerous occasions various aspects of the historical context to his spective of the person of Gustave Malécot and a conceptual account of his contributions to the field of populaearliest works. He explained how the leading Darwinians at the Université de Paris and the Sorbonne domition genetics. Some essential biographical information is given, but more important are some insights he himnated the intellectual scene in Paris and in France generally at that time. Malécot said that many of the French self gave into his early career. I was privileged to have him share these insights with me over the past 5 years. Darwinians were also communists or even Stalinists. This is despite the fact that today it may seem that Darwinism There are also some mathematical formulations necessary to put his work into its conceptual as well as historiand Stalinism are mutually exclusive, given the history of the role of Lamarckianism and social construction cal context. The structure is mostly chronological. At times this account borrows heavily from an important in the Soviet Union and China. As a result, the French Darwinists would invite from Russia only sympathetic Perspectives article written by Nagylaki (1989), who presented many details of Malécot’s mathematics, espescientists, not people such as N. I. Vavilov. More to the point, many of the Parisian Darwinians viewed Malécot’s cially the diffusion approximation approaches and other key conceptual issues. Other important accounts models as “anti-Darwinian” because the models were stochastic processes. of Malécot’s work and life include a recent interview with Bocquet-Appel (1996) and a series of articles by The Parisian Darwinians considered Fisher’s work to be the complete and unarguable truth in reconciling Gillois (1996a,b,c, and unpublished manuscript). As was discussed in detail by Nagylaki, and as Malécot Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s theory. Since Malécot found in Fisher’s (1918) article and later in his 1930 related directly to me, Malécot’s doctoral dissertation, guided by George Darmois and completed in 1939, fobook, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, much that was mathematically wrong, he incurred the displeasure cused on Fisher’s pioneering 1918 article on the phenotypic covariance of relatives. Prior to this, in 1935, Maléof these evolutionists. Malécot related how in some steps