Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher.
Career and research
Edwards is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and retired Professor of Biometry at the University of Cambridge, and holds both the ScD and LittD degrees. He has written several books and numerous scientific papers. With Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, he carried out pioneering work on quantitative methods of phylogenetic analysis, and he has strongly advocated Fisher's concept of likelihood as the proper basis for statistical and scientific inference. He has also written extensively on the history of genetics and statistics, including an analysis of whether Gregor Mendel's results were "too good" to be unmanipulated, and also on purely mathematical subjects, such as Venn diagrams. After one postdoctoral research year he was invited by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza to the University of Pavia, where, in 1961–1964, they initiated the statistical approach to the construction of evolutionary trees from genetical data, using the first modern computers. A year at Stanford University was followed by three years as a senior lecturer in Statistics at the University of Aberdeen supervised by D. J. Finney and then two years as a Bye-Fellow in Science at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, during which he wrote his book Likelihood. The remainder of Edwards's career has been spent at Cambridge, ultimately as Professor of Biometry, during which he has published widely, including books on Venn diagrams, mathematical genetics, and Pascal's triangle. In a 2003 paper, Edwards criticised Richard Lewontin's argument in a 1972 paper that race is an invalid taxonomic construct, terming it Lewontin's fallacy.
Franklin, A.; Edwards, A. W. F.; Fairbanks, D. J.; Hartl, D. L.; Seidenfeld, T. 2008. Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy.University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.
Anthology
Papers
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.; Edwards, A. W. F. 1964. Analysis of human evolution. Genetics Today 3:923–933.
Edwards, A. W. F.; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. 1964. Reconstruction of evolutionary trees. pp. 67–76 in Phenetic and Phylogenetic Classification, ed. Heywood, V. H. and McNeill, J. Systematics Association pub. no. 6, London.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.; Edwards, A. W. F. 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.
His elder brother John H. Edwards was also a geneticist and also an FRS; their father, Harold C. Edwards, was a surgeon. He was awarded the Telesio-Galilei Academy Award in 2011 for Biology. Edwards is involved in gliding, particularly within the Cambridge University Gliding Club and has written on the subject in Sailplane and Gliding magazine as "The Armchair Pilot".
