Walter Frank Raphael Weldon
FRS (15 March 1860 – 13 April 1906), was an English
evolutionary biologist and a founder of
biometry
Biostatistics (also known as biometry) is a branch of statistics that applies statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...
. He was the joint founding editor of ''
Biometrika'', with
Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English polymath and the originator of eugenics during the Victorian era; his ideas later became the basis of behavioural genetics.
Galton produced over 340 papers and b ...
and
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university ...
.
Family
Weldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist,
Walter Weldon, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883, Weldon married
Florence Tebb (1858–1936), daughter of the social reformer
William Tebb. Having studied mathematics at
Girton College, Cambridge, Florence was to act as the 'computer' for Weldon's research into biological variation.
Life and education
Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at
University College London
University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
. Among his teachers were the zoologist
E. Ray Lankester and the mathematician
Olaus Henrici. In the following year he transferred to
King's College London
King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public university, public research university in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of George IV of the United Kingdom, King George IV ...
and then to
St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...
in 1878.
There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist
Francis Balfour who influenced him greatly; Weldon gave up his plans for a career in medicine. In 1881 he gained a first-class honours degree in the Natural Science Tripos; in the autumn he left for the
Naples Zoological Station to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms.
On his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic. He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.
Career

Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in
Invertebrate
Invertebrates are animals that neither develop nor retain a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''spine'' or ''backbone''), which evolved from the notochord. It is a paraphyletic grouping including all animals excluding the chordata, chordate s ...
Morphology. Weldon's work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms.
In 1889 Weldon succeeded Lankester in the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at
University College London
University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
, and as curator of what is now the
Grant Museum of Zoology, and was elected to the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
in 1890. Royal Society records show his election supporters included the great zoologists of the day:
Huxley, Lankester,
Poulton,
Newton,
Flower
Flowers, also known as blooms and blossoms, are the reproductive structures of flowering plants ( angiosperms). Typically, they are structured in four circular levels, called whorls, around the end of a stalk. These whorls include: calyx, m ...
,
Romanes and others.
His interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation. He began using the statistical techniques that
Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English polymath and the originator of eugenics during the Victorian era; his ideas later became the basis of behavioural genetics.
Galton produced over 340 papers and b ...
had developed for he had come to the view that "the problem of animal evolution is essentially a statistical problem." Weldon began working with his University College colleague, the mathematician
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university ...
. Their partnership was very important to both men and survived Weldon's move to the
Linacre Chair of Zoology at
Oxford University
The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...
in 1899. In the years of their collaboration Pearson laid the foundations of modern statistics. Magnello emphasises this side of Weldon's career. In 1900 he took the DSc degree and as Linacre Professor he also held a Fellowship at
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College (in full: The House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford) is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 126 ...
.
Weldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional
selection in natural populations.
By 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon,
Galton and
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university ...
'For the Purpose of conducting Statistical Enquiry into the Variability of Organisms'. In an 1894 paper ''Some remarks on variation in plants and animals'' arising from the work of the Royal Society Committee, Weldon wrote:
:"... the questions raised by the Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method is the only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally checked."
In 1900 the work of
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel Order of Saint Augustine, OSA (; ; ; 20 July 1822 – 6 January 1884) was an Austrian Empire, Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinians, Augustinian friar and abbot of St Thomas's Abbey, Brno, St. Thom ...
was rediscovered and this precipitated a conflict between Weldon and Pearson on the one side and
William Bateson
William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscover ...
on the other. Bateson, who had been taught by Weldon, took a very strong line against the biometricians. This bitter dispute ranged across substantive issues of the nature of
evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...
and methodological issues such as the value of the statistical method.
Will Provine and Gregory Radick give detailed accounts of the controversy. The debate lost much of its intensity with the death of Weldon in 1906, though the general debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued until the creation of the
modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s.
After his death, the
Weldon Memorial Prize was established by the University of Oxford in his honour; it is awarded annually.
Weldon's dice
In 1894, Weldon rolled a set of 12 dice 26,306 times. He collected the data in part, 'to judge whether the differences between a series of group frequencies and a theoretical law, taken as a whole, were or were not more than might be attributed to the chance fluctuations of random sampling.' Weldon's dice data were used by Karl Pearson
[Pearson, Karl (1900). On the criterion that a given system of derivations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. ''Philosophical Magazine'', 5(50), 157–175.] in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic.
Notes
References
*
*
W.B. Provine (1971) The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.
*Magnello E. 2001. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, in ''Statisticians of the Centuries'' (eds C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta) p261-264. New York: Springer.
*Shipley A.E. 1908. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. ''Proc Roy Soc Series B'' 1908 vol 80 pxxv-xli.
External links
*
*
*
"On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas"Proceedings of the Royal Society, 54, (1893), 318–329. An example of Weldon's use of statistical methods
Photograph of Weldonon th
page.
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weldon, Walter Frank Raphael
British evolutionary biologists
English agnostics
English statisticians
English zoologists
British biostatisticians
Fellows of the Royal Society
Academics of University College London
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge
Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
Alumni of University College London
Alumni of King's College London
1860 births
1906 deaths
Deaths from pneumonia in England
Linacre Professors of Zoology
People from Highgate
Jodrell Professors of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy
19th-century British zoologists