Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size

Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size:

Continuing my series of notes on the work of Sewall Wright, I come to the question of population size. This is important in Wright's formulation of population genetics and his evolutionary theory generally. One of the major differences between Wright and R. A. Fisher is that Fisher believed that, in general, evolutionary processes could be treated as if they took place in a very large random-mating population. He did not believe, contrary to some caricatures, that species were literally random-mating across their entire range (which is obviously false), but rather that there was usually enough migration between different parts of that range that for most purposes the departures from random mating did not matter. Wright, on the other hand, believed that in many cases local populations were sufficiently isolated from each other that they could be treated as populations evolving separately. This difference of views had a major impact on Wright's and Fisher's assessment of the relative importance of selection and genetic drift.

Related: Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship, Notes on Sewall Wright: Path Analysis and On Reading Wright.