Link: The frequentist Bigfoot
Carl Zimmer connects Bigfoot with an explanation of the history of “null hypothesis” in a Nautilus essay: “Why we can’t rule out Bigfoot”. He discusses a rec...
All posts tagged with R. A. Fisher
Unraveling Fisher's mysteries
Haldane’s Sieve has a great post by James Lee giving context to a new preprint from him and Carson Chow: “Our paper: The causal meaning of Fishers average ef...
Spatial dispersal, parallel adaptation, and the "Stooge effect"
Peter Ralph and Graham Coop have an interesting paper in the current Genetics, titled, “Parallel Adaptation: One or Many Waves of Advance of an Advantageous ...
Quote: R. A. Fisher on chance and natural selection
From p. 37 of the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930):
R. A. Fisher's model of adaptation
Chapter 2 of R. A. Fisher’s Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is remarkable for many reasons. In it, he presents a model of selection in an age-structure...
Sergey Gavrilets on the two fitness landscapes
Sewall Wright’s metaphor of the “fitness landscape” is fundamental in the way many biologists think about adaptation. The idea of a population “climbing” tow...
Quote: Fisher defining epistasis
People often complain that R. A. Fisher wrote in a hard-to-read style; unnecessarily verbose and indirect. Either I don’t tend to mind, or I find that the st...
Phenotypic variance
I’ve intermittently been reading through William Provine’s The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. It’s related to a project simmering on my back bur...
Early concepts of cultural diffusion: the Boasians
I went looking for Lowie, because I was curious about the introduction of the diffusion concept into cultural anthropology. The mathematical description of d...
Why human evolution accelerated
n. b. This is a story about my work on recent human evolution, describing some of the main results and how the work came about. The story refers to my paper ...