Papadimitriou makes a comment on his talk about the status of Evolution theory in the early 1900’s. On the one side we have the Mendellian evolution theory, which is based on discrete categories, based largely on his experiments. He found that heredity shows up in distinct categories, either yellow or blue let’s say.

This is the topic of the book “Evolution: The Modern Synthesis” by Julian Huxley. It explains the story of reconciling Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel’s ideas on heredity in a joint mathematical framework. (see here for all topics on wikipedia)

Reconciling the two theories is not simple and it was the product of three figures in statistics, Fisher, Wright and Haldane during 1920-50 to bridge the gap.

This might be related to the concept of “genetic drift” (see here).

Reading List:

  • Evolution: The Modern Synthesis book
  • Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist book
  • The story is told in the section “Sidebar: The Equation that Reconciled Darwin and Mendel” of this article.
  • article
  • slides
  • website