Annals of Human Genetics

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Annals of Eugenics

Pearson edited the journal from 1925 to 1933. In a brief valedictory letter published at the time of his resignation, Pearson wrote that he had fallen short of his aspirations, having published only five volumes over eight years due to the limited financial resources of the Galton Laboratory. He reaffirmed his belief that eugenics was worthy as a subject of academic study and as a source of public policy, but warned against hastily adopting eugenic legislation, noting that the field contained too many theories weakly supported by anecdote or opinion. [3]

Ronald Fisher took over as editor in 1934 and with Humphry Rolleston, Reginald Ruggles Gates and Dr John Alexander Fraser Roberts on the editorial board. The journal focused more clearly on genetics and mathematical statistics. [4]

Ethical issues with rejection of an article related to China

In June 2021, the Annals refused to publish an article, coauthored by David Curtis, its editor-in-chief at the time, suggesting that academic journals should take a stance against China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang. [5] The journal has defended rejecting the piece and claimed that a boycott against China would be unfair and counterproductive (other journals also rejected the piece). It also denied being unduly deferential to China. [5]

Related Research Articles

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with heated debate around whether these technologies should be considered eugenics or not.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Galton</span> English polymath and eugenicist (1822–1911)

Sir Francis Galton was a British polymath in the Victorian era. He was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism. Galton was knighted in 1909.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Fisher</span> British polymath (1890–1962)

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Pearson</span> English polymath (1857–1936)

Karl Pearson was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyril Burt</span> Discredited English educational psychologist

Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist, alongside other fabrications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George R. Price</span> American mathematician

George Robert Price was an American population geneticist. Price is often noted for his formulation of the Price equation in 1967.

The Galton Laboratory was a laboratory for research into eugenics and then into human genetics based at University College London in London, England. It was originally established in 1904, and became part of UCL's biology department in 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance</span> Scientific article

"The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" is a scientific paper by Ronald Fisher which was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1918,. In it, Fisher puts forward the "infinitesimal model", a genetics conceptual model showing that continuous variation amongst phenotypic traits could be the result of Mendelian inheritance. The paper also contains the first use of the statistical term variance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Davenport</span> American biologist and eugenicist (1866–1944)

Charles Benedict Davenport was a biologist and eugenicist influential in the American eugenics movement.

Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was a British statistician and geneticist. Smith was born in Leicester. He was the younger son of John Bardell Smith (1876–1950), a mechanical engineer, and Ada. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys until 1929, when the family moved to London. His education continued at Bec School, Tooting, for three years, then at University College School, London. In 1935, although having failed his Higher School Certificate, he was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in the Mathematical Tripos, with a First in Part II in 1937 and a Distinction in Part III in 1938. Following graduation he began postgraduate research, taking his PhD in 1942.

The Adelphi Genetics Forum is a non-profit learned society based in the United Kingdom. Its aims are "to promote the public understanding of human heredity and to facilitate informed debate about the ethical issues raised by advances in reproductive technology."

<i>Biometrika</i> Academic journal

Biometrika is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for the Biometrika Trust. The editor-in-chief is Paul Fearnhead. The principal focus of this journal is theoretical statistics. It was established in 1901 and originally appeared quarterly. It changed to three issues per year in 1977 but returned to quarterly publication in 1992.

William Fleetwood Sheppard FRSE LLM Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.

Ethel Mary Elderton (1878–1954) was a British eugenics researcher who worked with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

Sylvia Dorothy Lawler was an English geneticist who worked in the field of human genetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Fisher bibliography</span>

The Ronald Fisher bibliography contains the works published by the English statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher (1890–1962).

Harry Harris FRS, FCRP, was a British-born biochemist. His work showed that human genetic variation was not rare and disease-causing but instead was common and usually harmless. He was the first to demonstrate, with biochemical tests, that with the exception of identical twins we are all different at the genetic level. This work paved the way for many well-known genetic concepts and procedures such as DNA fingerprinting, the prenatal diagnosis of disorders using genetic markers, the extensive heterogeneity of inherited diseases, and the mapping of human genes to chromosomes

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newton Morton</span> American population geneticist

Newton Ennis Morton was an American population geneticist and one of the founders of the field of genetic epidemiology.

Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences is a book by Francis Galton about the genetic inheritance of intelligence. It was first published in 1869 by Macmillan Publishers. The first American edition was published by D. Appleton & Company in 1870. It was Galton's first major work written from a hereditarian perspective. It was later referred to as "the first serious study of the inheritance of intelligence" and as "the beginning of scientific interest in the topic of genius."

In statistical genetics, Haseman–Elston (HE) regression is a form of statistical regression originally proposed for linkage analysis of quantitative traits for sibling pairs. It was first developed by Joseph K. Haseman and Robert C. Elston in 1972. A much earlier source of sib-pair linkage implementation was, in 1935 and 1938, proposed by Lionel S. Penrose, who is father of Nobel laureate theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. In 2000, Elston et al. proposed a "revisited", extended form of Haseman–Elston regression. Since then, further extensions to the "revisited" form of HE regression have been proposed. Although HE regression "...seems a rusty weapon in the genomics analysis armory of the GWAS era. This is because the HE regression relies on relatedness measured on IBD but not identity by state (IBS)...", HE has been adapted for association analysis in unrelated samples, whose relatedness is measured in IBS.

References

  1. Stigler, Stephen (July 2010). "Darwin, Galton and the Statistical Enlightenment". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A . 173 (3): 469–482. doi:10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00643.x.
  2. Barnett, Richard (May 2004). "Eugenics". The Lancet. 363 (9422): 1742. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(04)16280-6. PMID   15158655. S2CID   208793829.
  3. Pearson, Karl (1933). "Vale!". Annals of Eugenics. 5 (4): 416. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.1933.tb02102.x .
  4. "Foreword". Annals of Eugenics. 6 (1): i. 1934. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.1934.tb02103.x .
  5. 1 2 "Science journal editor says he quit over China boycott article". The Guardian . 30 June 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2023.