Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS[2] (born 1935) is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist.

[9] 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,[10] and also on purely mathematical subjects, such as Venn diagrams.

[11][12][13][14][15][16] 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.

[2] 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.