88 James F. Crow
learn from his father was self-taught. At Lombard College Wright was fortunate
to come under the stimulating influence of Dr. Wilhelmine Key — her husband
was a descendant of Francis Scott Key. She steered Wright to the Encyclopedia
Britannica. This was the great eleventh edition and the article on Mendelism was
written by a leading British geneticist, R. C. Punnett. She also expanded his
horizons and encouraged him to think of a career as a geneticist.
After his junior year, Wright spent a year (1909-1910) as a surveyor’s assistant
for a railroad line being built in the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota.
His mathematical skills were soon evident and he did the calculations for the
proper angles and alignment of the rails on turns. It was a time of great adventure
in the spirit of the old west with cowboys, Indians, mule-skinners, and outlaws. In
his later years he loved to talk about this and in his nineties he remembered an
astonishing number of words in the Sioux dialect. During this year, he developed
a lung infection, which necessitated his living in a caboose; he used the leisure
to read mathematics, including a book on quaternions. The book still exists. It
is clear that he read it with understanding and it is obvious exactly how far he
got. Curiously, Haldane read the same book, and as far as I know neither of them
ever made use of quaternions. Wright’s lung infection caused him to have trouble
getting life insurance, something that he found increasingly amusing as he lived
well into his nineties.
After a year at the University of Illinois, he joined the laboratory of William
Castle at Harvard. He received his PhD in 1915 and was immediately employed
as animal husbandman at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
near Washington, D. C. In 1926 he moved to the University of Chicago where he
stayed until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 65. He then moved to the
University of Wisconsin where he continued to work for an additional 30 years.
For more details, see[Provine, 1986].
In his retirement, Wright wrote the four volumes summarizing his life work
[Wright, 1968-78]. Wright continued to read and write until bad eyesight forced
him to give this up. He died prematurely in his ninety ninth year on March 3,
- I say prematurely because he was in robust health and looking forward to
a centennial celebration, which his colleagues were already planning. His poor
eyesight was the problem; on one of his walks he failed to see an icy spot and died
as the result of a fall.
Wright’s last paper[Wright, 1988]was a summary of his evolutionary views,
placing it in the context of the work of others and responding to some criticisms
in Provine’s book[Provine, 1986]. The reprints came while he was in the hospital
for the last time and he had explicit instructions as to where to send them.
2 INBREEDINGEvery student of introductory genetics learns Wright’s inbreeding coefficient and
a simple algorithm for computing it[Wright, 1922a]. There is a story behind
this. In the early years of the 20th century a number of people worked on the