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The Ontogeny of Sewall Wright and the Phylogeny of Evolution

Mark Twain, amidst other remarkable achievements, joined the select coterie of humans who get a second look at Halley's comet-for he arrived under its light in 1835 and departed as it reappeared in 1910. As Twain lay dying in Connecticut, Sewall Wright was observing Halley's comet from the top of a freight car in South Dakota, where he worked as a surveyor during a respite from college. When I first met Wright, he told me with glee of his plans for seeing Halley's comet again in 1986. The comet was faint, and the view was poor from Wisconsin, but Sewall Wright was on hand. Some people win our admiration for sheer persistence. Thornton Burgess wrote his daily animal stories for decades, missing not a single episode; for twenty years, Milton Cross never failed us as emcee of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon radio. When, as in the case of Sewall Wright, such persistent consistency combines with true brilliance, then we can only recall Emerson's quip: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet." William Provine ends his masterful intellectual biography of Wright by stating: "I predict that historians and biologists in the twenty-first century will look upon Wright as perhaps the single most influential evolutionary theorist of this century." I agree, and so would a few others with the requisite personal knowledge both of Wright and of evolutionary thought in our times. But Wright has been elusive to most, and his real contribution has therefore been overshadowed, for several reasons well analyzed by Provine. First, Wright's papers (now collected in Evolution: Selected Papers),' with their elliptical mathematical formalisms, are notoriously difficult to read and were not understood even by those most concerned with Wright's general ideas; moreover, Wright's dry and interminable lectures did not aid clarity on this alternative front either. Second, Wright took an intellectual's obligations to collegiality so seriously, and often in so self-effacing a manner, that he simply never had enough time (before retirement) to pursue his own work on schedule or to write a general treatise explaining his views. Wright's letters are manuscripts in themselves. He would answer any inquiry, in depth and at length (usually in several pages of single-spaced typescript). His letters were not mere compendia of thoughts and words, but solid scientific research, including derivation of formulas, specification of experimental designs, and working out of statistical tests in all their complexities. Recipients were inordinately grateful, and surely generous in their acknowledgment and praise. But these influences are ephemeral and do not enter the published record (beyond a line of thanks)-and they get lost to historians