Sten Gösta William Wahlund (1901 — 1976) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

, race biologist and politician. He is best known for first identifying the Wahlund effect, that subpopulations with different allele frequencies cause reduced

heterozygosity Zygosity (the noun, zygote, is from the Greek "yoked," from "yoke") () is the degree to which both copies of a chromosome or gene have the same genetic sequence. In other words, it is the degree of similarity of the alleles in an organism. Mos ...

than what is expected from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. He graduated from

Uppsala University Uppsala University (UU) () is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. Initially fou ...

in 1924 and received a PhD in 1933, while working at the

State Institute for Racial Biology The State Institute for Racial Biology (SIRB, ) was a Swedish governmental research institute founded in 1922 with the stated purpose of studying eugenics and human genetics. It was the most prominent institution for the study of "racial scienc ...

. He later became important in the Bondeförbundet and was a member of the

Swedish parliament The Riksdag ( , ; also or , ) is the parliament and the supreme decision-making body of the Kingdom of Sweden. Since 1971, the Riksdag has been a unicameral parliament with 349 members (), elected proportionally and serving, since 1994, f ...

References

1901 births 1976 deaths Swedish biologists Centre Party (Sweden) politicians Members of the Första kammaren Uppsala University alumni 20th-century Swedish biologists {{geneticist-stub