Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The Fisher Archive

A couple of years ago, while following up on my reading of Provine's book about Sewall Wright, I stumbled upon the University of Adelaide's Ronald A. Fisher Digital Archive. [Fisher and Wright tangled over the problem of maintenance of polymorphism at the self-incompatibility locus in plants.] I not only found what I was looking for--Fisher's unpublished manuscript on self-incompatibility--but also a trove of other manuscripts, documents, and letters.

By the way, Fisher's Erdös number is 2. I wonder if some crafty programmer-biologist out there would mind writing a Lande distance, or something similar.

2 comments:

sergios-orestis kolokotronis said...

Thanks for the book links. I didn't know Wright worked at the USDA in DC for 10 [very productive] years.

Maybe the Dobzhansky [Добжанський] distance would connect more people.

These online archives are really cool! Here's a couple I got.

*The Modern Synthesis lads [with Kimura-Ohta foto]
*CalTech Perspectives on Molecular Evolution
*Some classic texts in Mark Ridley's Evolution textbook
*T.H. Huxley File and my fave 1870 Biogenesis and Abiogenesis

Glor said...

This is a sweet resource, thanks for pointing it out. Some of the PDFs are low quality, but I'm picking nits. For anybody who cares, the book by Will Provine that Boris referred to is one of the best books about Science that has ever been written (a category that also includes Provine's treatment of "The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics").