Crow 1999

Citation

Crow, J. F. (1999). Hardy, Weinberg and language impediments. Genetics, 152(3), 821-825.

Links

• http://www.genetics.org/content/152/3/821
• http://hawaiireedlab.com/pdf/c/crow1999.pdf (internal lab link only)

Notes

Crow refers to Hardy 1908 as "a masterpiece of clarity". I don't really agree with this. I feel that [math]q_h^2 = p_h r_h[/math] is given without making it clear why this relationship holds when genotype frequencies do not change between generations.

The "Castle-Pearson-Hardy-Weinberg law", Crow points out that Castle and Pearson also found special cases of what we know today as "Hardy-Weinberg".

Wilhelm Weinberg was a physician to the poor that delivered thousands of babies. He noticed patterns among twins and began making inferences of heredity using mathematics. He also did not really engage other scientists with his ideas which, in addition to publishing in German, led to his work being overlooked. He developed quantitative genetics divided phenotypic variance into genetic and environmental components. Weinberg was also very skilled at recognizing and correcting for ascertainment bias. Crow also points out that Weinberg noticed a parental age / birth order effect on mutation rates, which was well before its time.

When turning to Hardy Crow seems to get side tracked. He mentions an earlier review focused on Hardy, Crow, J. F., 1988 Eighty years ago: the beginnings of population genetics. Genetics 119: 473–476., and then talks about Srinivasa Ramanujan and his amazing mathematical abilities.