Lillie's Paradox – Or, Some Hazards of Cellular Geography

Abstract

This chapter was written for a broad audience, including biologists, historians of science, philosophers of science, and sociologists. The topic offers something of interest to specialists in each of these fields, for it provides materials for case studies of conflicts with interacting conceptual, disciplinary, and institutional components among embryologists, geneticists, and workers in allied disciplines over the course of about 75 years. THE PARADOX I happily take the blame for the somewhat obscure label “Lillie's Paradox,” which I first heard used by Jane Maienschein. The paradox, widely known in various versions since about 1900, came to stand for a central failure of the research programs of Mendelian genetics, especially for embryologists. The failure endured from the 1920s forward into at least the 1950s. Indeed, some of the difficulties involved are, arguably, not yet fully resolved. This term honors Frank Rattray Lillie, a slightly younger contemporary and friend of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lillie, as we shall see, provided a pithy formulation of the paradox and argued that it meant that Morgan's theory of inheritance would be unable to provide a viable account of ontogenesis (i.e., the development of an organism from a fertilized egg to an adult). The paradox is easily understood. It turns on the fact that in virtually all multicellular organisms, virtually all cells have an entire complement of chromosomes and, thus, if you believe the chromosome theory, virtually all cells of a higher organism have the same genes.

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