R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: Origins, Publication, Reception, Legacies

This thesis examines the composition, publication, reception and reading of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection—an influential scientific book authored by British statistician, geneticist and eugenist Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962), and first published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1930. Today, the book has a mixed legacy. It is widely considered a scientific “classic”, celebrated for its role in laying the foundations of modern evolutionary theory. At the same time, it is recognised as a controversial eugenical tract. Whilst the book opens with seven highly mathematical chapters analysing the implications of combining Darwinian evolutionary theory with the new Mendelian genetics, its final five chapters set out a grandiose eugenical theory of racial decline. This thesis examines how such a book came to be, and how readers have responded to and used it in the decades since its initial publication in 1930.
Drawing upon book reviews, journals, magazines, newspapers, letters exchanged between readers, and the marginalia left in surviving copies of The Genetical Theory, I reconstruct individual acts of reading, and explore how the book’s meanings—including the perceived relationship between its “scientific” and “eugenical” halves—changed throughout the twentieth century as it encountered new readers in novel reading contexts. I show how readings of The Genetical Theory were affected by (and in some ways helped to effect) profound transformations in the scientific and cultural landscape, including the emergence of evolutionary biology as a professionalised scientific discipline in mid-century, and the decline of the eugenics movement in the post-war era. As the book circulated in new reading contexts, the boundaries of scientific knowledge, and of the text itself, were redrawn.