Full text of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

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David takes a slight detour in this Sewall Wright, series, R. A. Fisher and Epistasis: My next note on Sewall Wright will cover the exciting subject of the adaptive landscape. As every schoolboy knows, Wright considered epistatic gene interactions very important in determining the 'peaks' of the…
R. A. Fisher and the Adaptive Landscape: ...My own interpretation is that Fisher was sceptical about the value of the landscape concept as such, because both environmental and genetic conditions were too changeable for the metaphor of a 'landscape' to be useful. For Fisher the question of the '…
Bathynomus giganteus (Arthropoda: Crustacea: Isopoda: Cirolanidae) You know those cute little roly-poly bugs you found under rocks as a kid? You poke at them and they curl up into a little ball? Well, magnify that times 1000, take away the functional role of the eyes, head to the deep-sea…
Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My…

Nice! As it happens I was just checking on prices for this on Amazon (prompted by DavidB's latest post on GNXP), and even $46.00 for used copies was a bit rich for me in present circumstances. So to have this online is excellent.

A related question: Has anyone done (online or off) an annotated version of "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection"? (I know there's the recent variorum edition, but it didn't sound as if it had detailed annotations.) If I recall correctly from your and other's posts, Fisher has a tendency to cryptic brevity at times, plus it would be useful to have notes on what in the book still holds up, and what has been refuted or modified by later work.

It seems to be down. Too many people wanting a glimpse I suppose?

fixed the second link. don't know why the first wasn't working.

Nice! As it happens I was just checking on prices for this on Amazon (prompted by DavidB's latest post on GNXP), and even $46.00 for used copies was a bit rich for me in present circumstances. So to have this online is excellent.

yeah, sometimes you can find a cheap copy on abebooks, but it's way deviated from e(x) :-) i snatched up mine for $25 and counted myself among the few!

and no, i don't know anything that annotated. david b's posts are pretty close IMO.

Are they allowed to put this up online? This is an interesting question. As I understand it, under UK copyright law the copyright on GToNS would normally expire at the end of 2032 (70 years after Fisher's death in 1962). (Prior to the UK extending copyright terms, the copyright would have expired 50 years after Fisher's death, or at the end of 2012. I presume the copyrights of existing works were extended in the UK as was done in the US.)

Fisher donated his copyrights to the University of Adelaide, but I suspect that would not make a difference in the copyright term. (Answering this would really require consulting an attorney with experience in Australian copyright law.) For what it's worth the copyright page of the variorum edition says "Copyright 1999 University of Adelaide", but I presume this refers to the added material and not to the text of the original work.

The folks at the Internet Archive (which hosts the Open Library) are not dummies when it comes to copyright law, so I presume that they either have it on good authority that the work is now in the public domain, or they received permission from the University of Adelaide. However the work on Open Library was actually scanned in by a library in India and it's the 1930 edition not the 1958 edition, which seems odd if the University of Adelaide were officially involved. So it may also be that this publication was not authorized, and that the book won't be truly freely available until January 1, 2033 -- over 100 years since its original publication.

One more thing, for those who hadn't noticed: The Open Library is also hosting downloadable versions of the book in multiple formats, including PDF and text.

Sorry, I can't let this question go. Two more data points:

First, the US Copyright Office has one record for GToNS, showing a renewal of copyright in 1986 on the 1958 edition; this would have been at the end of the initial 28-year copyright term allowed by US law in 1958. The Copyright Term Extension Act would then have extended the copyright until 2053 in the US (95 years after the publication date).

However the work published by the Open Library is the 1930 edition, not the 195 edition, and it appears to have no copyright notice whatsoever. If such a work had been published in the US and was not registered with the US Copyright Office, then I believe it would not have had copyright protection at all and would have entered the public domain. By issuing a revised edition in 1958 Fisher would have addressed that problem (assuming it were a problem), since the 1958 edition would have qualified as a new work for purposes of US copyright law. (Note that the LoC record referenced above states "Basis of Claim: New Matter: revisions & expansion.")

So my conclusion at this point is that the 1958 edition of GToNS will not enter the public domain for many years, but that the copyright status of the 1930 edition is an open question. It's at least possible that the 1930 edition is in the public domain in the US (though not necessarily in other countries).