2002 Sewall Wright Award. Linda Partridge.

Dietary restriction in long-lived dwarf flies.

The Heuristic Role of Sewall Wright’s 1932 Adaptive Landscape Diagram

Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape is the most influential heuristic in evolutionary biology. Wright’s biographer, Provine, criticized Wright’s adaptive landscape, claiming that its heuristic value is dubious because of deep flaws. Ruse has defended Wright against Provine. Ruse claims Provine has not shown Wright’s use of the landscape is flawed, and that, even if it were, it is heuristically v...

Sewall Wright ’ s adaptive landscapes : 1932 vs . 1988

Sewall Wright introduced the metaphor of evolution on ‘‘adaptive landscapes’’ in a pair of papers published in 1931 and 1932. The metaphor has been one of the most influential in modern evolutionary biology, although recent theoretical advancements show that it is deeply flawed and may have actually created research questions that are not, in fact, fecund. In this paper I examine in detail what...

Sewall Wright and Gustave Malécot on Isolation by Distance

Effective population size

What is it? An aid to calculation in population genetics, introduced by Sewall Wright. The rate of change of the genetic make-up of a population by genetic drift — fluctuations in allele frequencies caused by random sampling — is inversely related to the effective population size, Ne. Ne is measured with reference to an ideal ‘Wright–Fisher’ population. This has a fixed number of N diploid bree...