Hardy 1908

Citation

Hardy, G. H. (1908) Mendelian Proportions in a mixed population. Science 28(706): 49-50.

Links

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636004

Notes

The tone of the first paragraph is a bit amusing, at least to a modern reader. It is hard to know how much of this is overt criticism versus formal language in 1908. However, this sentence is unambiguous, "I should have expected the very simple point which I wish to make to have been familiar to biologists". Hardy definitely felt that the question of expected genotype proportions was far too trivial for him to waste time upon yet was forced to do so by the misunderstandings of others. The irony is that this is probably the result for which he is best know today. Elsewhere he keeps going with "a little mathematics of the multiplication-table type is enough to show ...", "it is easy to see ...", and "there is not the slightest foundation for the idea ...".

At the time there was a debate about the general validity of Mendelian genetics in terms of understanding biological heritability. This was part of the Biometric-Mendelian Debate (or mutationalists versus selectionists), which was not resolved until the Modern Synthesis of biology later in the 20th century.