Selection everlasting, suppositions no more

The BiometricianI have alluded over the years to the early 20th century conflict between Mendelians, who were proto-geneticists, and the biometricians, who were classical Darwinians. As if in a Hegelian dialectic this clash of egos eventually lead to the synthesis which became population genetics. The historical process is outlined beautifully in Will Provine's The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, but at the time it bore fruit in R. A. Fisher's 1918 paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance. One might argue that though this publication ended the explicit debate and division, the reality is that the difference continued, not because of fundamental differences, but pragmatic ones. Classical population geneticists focused on single or two locus models to develop their intuitions about the trajectory of evolutionary processes. Quantitative geneticists refined their statistical techniques of inference on continuous characters whose heritable character was confirmed, but whose specific causal ...