University College London
Which school did Raphael Weldon go to from 1876 to 1877?
Raphael Weldon Walter Frank Raphael Weldon DSc FRS ( 15 March 1860 in Highgate , London – 13 April 1906 in Oxford ) generally called Raphael Weldon , was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry . He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika , with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson . Family . Weldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist , Walter Weldon , and his wife Anne Cotton . On 13 March 1883 Weldon married Florence Tebb , daughter of the social reformer William Tebb Life and education . Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at University College London . Among his teachers were the zoologist E . Ray Lankester and the mathematician Olaus Henrici . In the following year he transferred to Kings College London and then to St Johns College , Cambridge in 1878 . There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist Francis Balfour who influenced him greatly ; Weldon gave up his plans for a career in medicine . In 1881 he gained a first-class honours degree in the Natural Science Tripos ; in the autumn he left for the Naples Zoological Station to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms . On his religious views , he considered himself an agnostic . He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia , and is buried at Holywell Church , Oxford . Career . Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882 , he was appointed university lecturer in Invertebrate Morphology . Weldons work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms . In 1889 Weldon succeeded Lankester in the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at University College London , and as curator of what is now the Grant Museum of Zoology , and was elected to the Royal Society in 1890 . Royal Society records show his election supporters included the great zoologists of the day : Huxley , Lankester , Poulton , Newton , Flower , Romanes and others . His interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation . He began using the statistical techniques that Francis Galton had developed for he had come to the view that the problem of animal evolution is essentially a statistical problem . Weldon began working with his University College colleague , the mathematician Karl Pearson . Their partnership was very important to both men and survived Weldons move to the Linacre Chair of Zoology at Oxford University in 1899 . In the years of their collaboration Pearson laid the foundations of modern statistics . Magnello emphasises this side of Weldons career . In 1900 he took the DSc degree and as Linacre Professor he also held a Fellowship at Merton College , Oxford . Weldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional selection in natural populations . By 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon , Galton and Karl Pearson For the Purpose of conducting Statistical Enquiry into the Variability of Organisms . In an 1894 paper Some remarks on variation in plants and animals arising from the work of the Royal Society Committee , Weldon wrote : In 1900 the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and this precipitated a conflict between Weldon and Pearson on the one side and William Bateson on the other . Bateson , who had been taught by Weldon , took a very strong line against the biometricians . This bitter dispute ranged across substantive issues of the nature of evolution and methodological issues such as the value of the statistical method . Will Provine gives a detailed account of the controversy . The debate lost much of its intensity with the death of Weldon in 1906 , though the general debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued until the creation of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s . After his death , the Weldon Memorial Prize was established by the University of Oxford in his honour ; it is awarded annually . Weldons dice . In 1894 , Weldon rolled a set of 12 dice 26,306 times . He collected the data in part , to judge whether the differences between a series of group frequencies and a theoretical law , taken as a whole , were or were not more than might be attributed to the chance fluctuations of random sampling . Weldons dice data were used by Karl Pearson in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic . As a project for a History of Statistics course taught at the University of Chicago , Zacariah Labby built a machine to roll the dice and automatically count the dots ( pips ) on each die . The resulting data allowed Labby to repeat Weldon and Pearsons original investigations , as well as delve deeper into the analysis . References . - W.B . Provine ( 1971 ) The origins of theoretical population genetics . University of Chicago Press . - Magnello E . 2001 . Walter Frank Raphael Weldon , in Statisticians of the Centuries ( eds C.C . Heyde and E . Seneta ) p261-264 . New York : Springer . - Shipley A.E . 1908 . Walter Frank Raphael Weldon . Proc Roy Soc Series B 1908 vol 80 pxxv-xli . External links . - On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas Proceedings of the Royal Society , 54 , ( 1893 ) , 318–329 . An example of Weldons use of statistical methods - Photograph of Weldon on the Portraits of Statisticians page .