Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology - Softcover

Radick, Gregory

 
9780226822723: Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0226822729 ISBN 13: 9780226822723
Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A root-and-branch rethinking of how history has shaped the science of genetics.

In 1900, almost no one had heard of Gregor Mendel. Ten years later, he was famous as the father of a new science of heredity—genetics. Even today, Mendelian ideas serve as a standard point of entry for learning about genes. The message students receive is plain: the twenty-first century owes an enlightened understanding of how biological inheritance really works to the persistence of an intellectual inheritance that traces back to Mendel’s garden. 

Disputed Inheritance turns that message on its head. As Gregory Radick shows, Mendelian ideas became foundational not because they match reality—little in nature behaves like Mendel’s peas—but because, in England in the early years of the twentieth century, a ferocious debate ended as it did. On one side was the Cambridge biologist William Bateson, who, in Mendel’s name, wanted biology and society reorganized around the recognition that heredity is destiny. On the other side was the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon, who, admiring Mendel's discoveries in a limited way, thought Bateson's "Mendelism" represented a backward step, since it pushed growing knowledge of the modifying role of environments, internal and external, to the margins. Weldon's untimely death in 1906, before he could finish a book setting out his alternative vision, is, Radick suggests, what sealed the Mendelian victory.

Bringing together extensive archival research with searching analyses of the nature of science and history, Disputed Inheritance challenges the way we think about genetics and its possibilities, past, present, and future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gregory Radick is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coauthor, most recently, of Darwin’s Argument by Analogy. 

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“A Scotch soldier, when I was lecturing in Y.M.C.A. huts, said: ‘Sir, what ye’re telling us is nothing but Scientific Calvinism.’ Sometimes I think that would serve.”—William Bateson, 1920, on what to call a volume collecting his “lay” papers on Mendelism
 
“Scientific Calvinism” never took hold as a name for the science of inheritance that boomed its way into biology in the early years of the twentieth century. “Mendelism” fared much better, and “genetics”—William Bateson’s coinage in 1905—better still, along with an associated word that arrived in 1909, “gene.” Nowadays, talk of genes is everywhere, in and out of biology: genes for aggression, alcoholism, and autism; for baldness, blue eyes, and breast cancer; for caffeine consumption, curly hair, and cystic fibrosis. You name it, and there is, we are told, a gene for it, invisibly pulling the strings, determining how our bodies grow and our lives go. How and why did such talk become so pervasive?
 
A familiar answer runs like this. We came to talk of inheritance as genic for the same reason that we came to talk of species as evolved and matter as atomic: because genes and evolution and atoms are real, and whatever is real is bound to get discovered eventually. Gregor Mendel (1822–84) discovered the gene through experiments that he conducted with varieties of the garden pea in the garden of the monastery where he lived and worked in Brünn, in the Austrian Empire (now Brno, in the Czech Republic). He reported his discovery in 1865, publishing it the next year. But alas, Mendel was ahead of his time, and his achievement went unrecognized. Only in 1900, well after his death, were biologists ready to appreciate the significance of what he had done. They made up for lost time, however, swiftly establishing a new science based on the gene. The rest is history: of science, but also of medicine, agriculture, and domains almost undreamt of in Mendel’s day, such as forensics. What we now know about inheritance, and what we know how to do with it, we owe to the discovery of the gene. Mendel got there first, but the discovery was inevitable, along with the central role that biologists assign to genes in understanding and controlling life.
 
This book aims to replace this answer with a rather different one. We came to talk of inheritance as genic, I will suggest, not because the invisible string-pullers are real but because, in the early years of the twentieth century, a debate over Mendel’s experiments and their interpretation went as it did. The debate was centered in England, indeed, in its two ancient universities, Cambridge and Oxford. On the one side was the Cambridge-based William Bateson (1861–1926). From 1900, he made it his mission to reshape biology in the image of Mendel’s experiments. For Bateson, what Mendel had done in that monastery garden was to sweep away all of the hitherto distorting complexity surrounding inheritance, exposing its underlying simplicity: a vision kept alive in our textbooks. On the other side was the Oxford-based Walter Frank Raphael Weldon (1860–1906). Admiring Mendel’s experiments in a limited way, Weldon nevertheless regarded them as profoundly misleading if taken as a guide to inheritance as such. In Weldon’s view, Mendel had shown not how heredity at its most basic works, but what it looks like in lineages from which almost all ordinary sources of variability, internal and external, have been eliminated. To generalize from Mendelian experiments, in which context had been made to look ignorable and hereditary characters made to look well described by x-or-y (yellow-or-green, round-or-wrinkled, purple-flowered-or-white-flowered) categories, was thus to mistake the exception for the rule.
 
The debate between Bateson and Weldon drew in others, but no one else cared as deeply, fought as bitterly, or—in consequence—thought as creatively about what was at stake in reorganizing the science of heredity around Mendel’s peas. Nor was the Mendelian victory a foregone conclusion. Indeed, by winter 1905–6, Weldon seemed, in Bateson’s eyes, to be worryingly close to winning the argument. But then, in spring 1906, Weldon died, with a book manuscript setting out his alternative vision unfinished. I shall argue that had Weldon lived, and had Bateson’s fears been realized, our present understanding of how heredity works, and our ability to make use of that knowledge in ways we value, would have been none the poorer. Indeed, in some crucial respects, we might now be better off. We might still talk of “genes,” but without even a hint of that string-puller notion, as though the presence of a particular DNA variant in itself, and by itself, can determine whether or not someone is born to be aggressive, alcoholic, or autistic; to be bald, blue-eyed, or doomed to breast cancer; to crave caffeine, have curly hair, or suffer from cystic fibrosis. Instead, our gene talk would be routinely hedged with talk of contexts, internal and external, because our concept of the gene—“our” meaning everybody’s, no matter how glancing their contact with biological science—would be of an entity whose effects on bodies and minds can be variable depending on the mix of other causes in play. Change those other causes, and you potentially change a gene’s effect, or even extinguish it: something you would hardly guess if you think of inheritance as Mendel’s peas writ large. No wonder that, on hearing Bateson lecture, a Scottish soldier recalled fatalist theology at its most grim.
 
* * *
 
Ever since Bateson’s day, introductory lectures in genetics typically deal early on with Mendel’s experiments. Mendel, the student will learn, was a scientifically inclined monk who, in the mid-1850s, having become interested in the mystery of the biological ties binding offspring to their parents—the mystery of inheritance—turned the garden of his monastery into a laboratory devoted to experimental hybridizing. With uncommon shrewdness, he judged the garden pea to be an especially suitable choice for these experiments because it has a suite of easily tracked, sharply differentiated, either/or hereditary characters. The color of a garden-pea seed is either yellow or green. Similarly, the surface of the seed is either smoothly round or unsmoothly wrinkled; the color of the flower on the plant that grows from the seed is either purple or white; the plant itself is either tall or “dwarf”; and so on, with seven such characters tracked in all. Next, and again shrewdly, before beginning to make hybrid plants, Mendel spent a very long time purifying his originating stocks, making sure that—to stick with flower color for now—his purple-flowered pea plants only ever gave purple-flowered progeny, and his white-flowered pea plants only ever gave white-flowered progeny. The stocks became, in other words, “true-breeding.” Only at that point did he begin the experiments per se: first cross-fertilizing; then collecting the hybrid seeds produced; and then planting them. He did all this not with a handful of plants but (showing yet another sign of shrewdness) with lots of them—indeed, ultimately, over the eight years of his work in the garden, over ten thousand of them. And what he found is that the plants grown from the hybrid seeds, when they produced their own flowers, produced flowers that were not lilac, nor mottled purple and white, nor a mixture of purple and white, but uniformly purple.
 
Here was a remarkable empirical discovery: a regularity new to science, uncovered thanks to the care...

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Verlag
University of Chicago Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0226822729
ISBN 13 
9780226822723
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
630
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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