A note on the background to, and refereeing of, R. A. Fisher’s 1918 paper ‘On the correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance’

The controversy between the biometricians W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson on the one hand, and William Bateson and his fellow Mendelian theorists on the other, which came to a head after 1900, the date of the rediscovery of Mendel’s ideas, leaves ripples which have still not entirely died down. We have recently, for example, had brought to our notice a review by Oscar Kempthorne of Volume 1 of the Collected papers of R. A. Fisher, which, very naturally, refers to Fisher’s 1918 paper on ‘The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance’, finally published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.