50 Sahotra Sarkar
The passage contains two errors: Huxley [1942] never used the term “evolution-
ary synthesis” and the concept of such a synthesis goes back to Haldane [1938].
But what is crucial is that Mayr frames the synthesis between 1936 to 1947. The
definitive works of the theoretical population geneticists were all published by
1932 and Mayr was intentionally shifting attentionaway from them to figures
such as Dobzhansky [1937], Huxley [1940] and, especially, himself [Mayr, 1942].
The naturalists, including the systematicists, emerge as the dominant figures in
his account.
Thus Mayr, too, has no place for Haldane. This is particularly striking because
some commentators, including Carson [1990, 89] at the same conference, argued
that Haldane’s [1932]Causes of Evolutionwas central to the synthesis. As Carson
put it, that book was the only one in that era in which
we find integrated and facile discussions of the evolutionary implication
of theDrosophilachromosome studies, allopolyploidy inPrimula,and
Darwinian fitness[.] Here Haldane neatly conjoins Darwin and Mendel,
Fisher and Wright, Newton and Kihara. In the evolutionary context,
Haldane deals for the first time with inversions and translocations,
polyploidy and hybridization. The paleontological record is woven into
the argument. [1990, 89].Moreover, in a well-known mathematical appendix of that book which served as
a primer for the next generation of population geneticists, Haldane collected and
systematized all the results that he, Fisher, and Wright had thus far obtained. It
is time for a reappraisal of Haldane’s role.
2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDTo see what Haldane’s work achieved in the 1920s and 1930s requires some dis-
cussion of the background. Mendel’s laws, which had remained unknown for a
generation, had been recovered only around 1900. A systematic exploration of
their mathematical consequences began immediately with G. Udny Yule [1902]
and, especially, Karl Pearson [1904] who, however, was a strident advocate of
the competing biometrical model of inheritance. Pearson was unimpressed, ar-
guing that Mendel’s laws gave values far too low for the correlation coefficients
between traits in related individuals which his biometrical laboratory had been
measuring for the past decade. But these arguments were far from conclusive with
Yule [1906] pointing out that a straightforward relaxation of one of Pearson’s as-
sumptions (complete dominance) resolved the apparent discrepancies between the
observed and calculated coefficients.
While this dispute stagnated in the background, scattered work on a variety of
Mendelian models began, primarily in Britain and the United States. The first
truly significant result of theoretical population genetics, the Hardy-Weinberg rule,
was independently discovered in 1908 by a German physician, W. Weinberg, and