Anthony William Fairbank Edwards (born 1935) is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 statistician

Statistician

A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...

, geneticist

Geneticist

A geneticist is a biologist who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a researcher or lecturer. Some geneticists perform experiments and analyze data to interpret the inheritance of skills. A geneticist is also a Consultant or...

, and evolutionary biologist, sometimes called Fisher's Edwards

The Edwards brothers, Fisher, and Hogben

The brothers John H. and A.W.F. Edwards, and their respective mentors Lancelot Hogben and Ronald Fisher, were scientists in the 20th century. The two senior researchers developed opposing theories on the genotype-environment interaction ; the elder brother, John, came to be known as "Hogben's...

. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and retired Professor of Biometry at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, and holds both the ScD and LittD degrees. A pupil of R.A. Fisher

Ronald Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...

, he has written several books and numerous scientific papers. He is best known for his pioneering work, with L.L. Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is an Italian population geneticist born in Genoa, who has been a professor at Stanford University since 1970 .-Books:...

, on quantitative methods of phylogenetic analysis

Phylogenetics

In biology, phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups of organisms , which is discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices...

, and for strongly advocating Fisher's concept of likelihood

Likelihood principle

In statistics,the likelihood principle is a controversial principle of statistical inference which asserts that all of the information in a sample is contained in the likelihood function....

 as the proper basis for statistical

Statistical inference

In statistics, statistical inference is the process of drawing conclusions from data that are subject to random variation, for example, observational errors or sampling variation...

 and scientific inference. He has also written extensively on the history of genetics and statistics, including an analysis of whether Mendel's

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...

 results were "too good", and also on purely mathematical subjects, such as Venn diagram

Venn diagram

Venn diagrams or set diagrams are diagrams that show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets . Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn...

s. His elder brother John H. Edwards

John H. Edwards

John Hilton Edwards was a British medical geneticist. Edwards reported the first description of a syndrome of multiple congenital malformations associated the presence of an extra chromosome. The extra chromosome belonged to the E group of chromosomes which consisted of chromosomes 16, 17 and 18...

 (1928–2007) was also a geneticist; their father Harold C. Edwards was a surgeon.

He is also known for his involvement in gliding

Glider (sailplane)

A glider or sailplane is a type of glider aircraft used in the sport of gliding. Some gliders, known as motor gliders are used for gliding and soaring as well, but have engines which can, in some cases, be used for take-off or for extending a flight...

, particularly within the Cambridge University Gliding Club

Cambridge Gliding Centre

Cambridge Gliding Centre is a gliding club based near Cambridge in the United Kingdom on the Bedfordshire/Cambridgeshire county border. Nearby major towns include Bedford, Cambourne, Huntingdon, Royston, Sandy, St. Ives and St...

and for his writing on the subject in Sailplane and Gliding magazine as "the armchair pilot".

Publications

• A.W.F. Edwards: Scientific Publications is a reasonably complete list up to the beginning of 2011.

Books

• Edwards, A.W.F. 1972. Likelihood. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (expanded edition, 1992, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore). ISBN 0-8018-4443-6
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1977. Foundations of Mathematical Genetics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2nd ed., 2000). ISBN 0-521-77544-2
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1987. Pascal's Arithmetical Triangle: The Story of a Mathematical Idea. Charles Griffin, London (paperback edition, 2002, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore). ISBN 0-8018-6946-3
• David, H.A. and A.W.F. Edwards. 2001. Annotated Readings in the History of Statistics. Springer, New York. ISBN 0-387-98844-0
• Edwards, A.W.F. 2004. Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-7434-3
• Keynes, M., A.W.F. Edwards and R. Peel, eds. 2004. A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida. ISBN 0-415-32960-4
• Franklin, A., A.W.F. Edwards, D.J. Fairbanks, D.L. Hartl and T. Seidenfeld. 2008. Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh. ISBN 0-8229-4319-0

Selected papers

• Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and A.W.F. Edwards. 1964. Analysis of human evolution. Genetics Today 3:923–933.
• Edwards, A.W.F, and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. 1964. Reconstruction of evolutionary trees. pp. 67–76 in Phenetic and Phylogenetic Classification, ed. V. H. Heywood and J. McNeill. Systematics Association pub. no. 6, London.
• Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and A.W.F. Edwards. 1967. Phylogenetic analysis: models and estimation procedures. American Journal of Human Genetics 19:233–257.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1969. Statistical methods in scientific inference. Nature 222:1233–1237.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1974. The history of likelihood. International Statistical Review 42:9–15.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1986. Are Mendel's results really too close? Biological Reviews 61:295–312.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 1996. The origin and early development of the method of minimum evolution for the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees. Systematic Biology 45:79–91.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 2000. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Genetics 154:1419–1426.
• Edwards, A.W.F. 2003. Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. BioEssays 25:798–801.

External links

• Interview
• A Realised Path: The Cambridge Statistical Laboratory upto (sic) 1993 (revised 2002)
• Gonville and Caius College Who's Who
• Cambridge University Library photograph of Edwards as Chairman of the Library Syndicate making a presentation to the President of Israel
• Edwards inspired the window in the Hall of Caius College, celebrating Venn and Fisher, former fellows and heroes of his
• A collection of R. A. Fisher quotations compiled by A.W.F. Edwards