Treasure your exceptions: the science and life of William Bateson

Abstract

first time, a paper that Mendel had published in 1865 in an obscure journal, the Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brunn, copies of which has been distributed to many academic centres [2].In 1900 Mendel's work was found and confirmed (i.e."rediscovered").Studies of evolution between 1865 and that date were defective because studies of the history of evolution in that period had been defective.And studies of the history of evolution were defective, because studies of evolution in that period had been defective.Evolutionists had not alerted historians to the significance of the new approach Mendel had pioneered, and the few historians who came across the work had not effectively communicated it to evolutionists.It fell to William Bateson, who had also begun researching along these lines, to communicate Mendel's ideas to the English-speaking world, and to fight for their acceptance.By 1909 the battle was over.Mendelism was accepted and Mendel's paper had been translated and distributed world-wide.Holder of the first Chair in Biology at Cambridge University, Bateson was at the height of his power and influence.In 1906 one of his students had spread the word in a popular textbook -Variation, Heredity and Evolution -which ran to several editions.In 1907 Bateson had given the Silliman Lecture at Yale, and in 1909 his advanced treatise, Mendel's Principles of Heredity, was published by Cambridge University Press.To commemorate the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, a call to contribute essays to a volume entitled Darwin and Modern Science had gone to leading figures in the field.Bateson took this as an opportunity, not only to pay tribute to Darwin and Mendel, but also to push the agenda of science ahead and beyond them.His essay -"Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights" -encapsulated in its clearest form, a new view of evolution he had developed from foundations laid by Francis Galton decades earlier.It might just as well have been 1865.Unlike Mendel on that date, Bateson in 1909 was not an obscure monk in a distant monastery.He, more than any other in the biological sciences, was centre stage.This was his hour.Yet, as with Mendel, his words fell on fallow ground.In a way, he was partly responsible for his own demise, as he later came to recognize.He, more than any other, had travelled the land, indeed, the world, trumpeting Mendelism -the idea that the various characters of living organisms were represented by distinct units (later known as genes), half of which came to a child from its mother and half of which came to a child from its father.In essence this was quite a simple message.Then as now, in marketing, simple messages worked.Then as now, the same applied to the marketing of scientific ideas.Accordingly, subtle scientific ideas tended to lose out to simple scientific ideas, and subtle scientists tended to lose out to the unsubtle.The appeal of Darwinism had been so seductive and had suggested so many interesting lines of research, that Mendel's abstractions (after all, no one had ever seen a Mendelian unit) would very likely not have been understood in 1865.Likewise, the appeal of Mendelism was now so seductive that Bateson's abstractions, to be discussed in the chapters ahead, suffered a similar fate in 1909.Genes explained so much that the temptation to believe that they could explain everything was overwhelming.And the genic paradigm spawned an eminently marketable research agenda.What were genes?How were they passed from generation Prologue to First Edition ix to generation?How was the information contained in a gene expressed in an organism carrying that gene?Could "good" genes be transferred to organisms with "bad" genes, so curing genetic defects?With so much to be done there was little incentive to look beyond genes.The genic juggernaut moved off, gaining a momentum that would take it through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.Nevertheless, Bateson's voice was not a lone one.As set out in my speciation text, The Origin of Species Revisited, Darwin's research associate, George Romanes, had anticipated Bateson in 1886 [3].Subsequently, in Evolutionary Bioinformatics, I showed how biologist Richard Goldschmidt had taken a similar position in the 1930s [4].Paleontologist and biohistorian Stephen Jay Gould struggled for decades to make sense of Goldschmidt, but in 2002 in his final work The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he admitted defeat [5].Gould confessed his "relative ignorance" of the flood of new information on genomes emerging from various genome sequencing projects.It turned out that, just as Bateson and the Continental botanists had to push beyond Darwinism in the 1890s to "rediscover" the work of Mendel and found a new science -Genetics, so those analyzing the vast quantities of DNA sequence information made available in the 1990s had to push beyond genocentrism to "rediscover" the work of Romanes, Bateson and Goldschmidt, and found a new science -Evolutionary Bioinformatics (EB).Yet, there are remarkable differences between the "rediscoveries" of the 1890s and the 1990s, which make the task of writing a biography of Bateson particularly fascinating.Mendel quietly wrote his few papers that, although of major import, were narrowly focussed on his experimental work.He then meekly (regarding science) retired to his cloister, was "rediscovered" within two decades of his death and was celebrated henceforth.Bateson, on the other hand, took the whole of biology (and much more) as his domain, and was far from meek in arguing his case.Both before and long after his death, he was attacked by the genocentrists (labelled by Gould as "ultra-Darwinian fundamentalists"), and he was not "rediscovered" until many decades after his death [3].Whereas Mendel's eclipse was for 35 years, Bateson's was for a century.Up to the present time, while his early contributions to genetics are recognized, his fundamental contributions to evolutionary biology have never been celebratedindeed, the very opposite -he has been condemned as a conservative who slowed scientific advance.Biohistorians have acknowledged their difficulties in determining his role.John Lesch observed [6] that "The development of evolutionary theory in the two decades from Darwin's death to the turn of the century remains very largely terra incognita for the historian," while William Provine lamented [7] that "Evolutionary biology in the period 1859-1925 is extraordinarily complex."To understand these years we have to understand Bateson.Which brings us to this book, and its dual authorship by Alan Cock and myself.The reader will find below part two of this three-part Prologue, which was written by Alan around 1980.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.