S6.26: The battle for biology: How Mendel came to rule the world
Hello, and welcome to Genetics Unzipped - the Genetics Society podcast, with me, Dr Kat Arney. In this episode we’re exploring the colossal impact that Gregor Mendel and his populariser William Bateson have had on the past century of genetics, and asking whether there could have been another way - a more Weldonian, rather than Mendelian, view of the world.
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It’s June 1902, and English biologist Raphael Weldon is not happy.
“It seems to me, quite apart from my own share in the matter, that the present is a rather interesting and important moment. There is a “boom” in a quite unstatistical theory of inheritance, which is so simple that everyone can understand it, and is stated so confidently that all sorts of people are getting interested in it. We can make it ridiculous, and I think we must. It is really the first time the unstatistical folk have fairly recognised that there is a fundamental antithesis, and have accepted battle on that issue.”
In this letter to his collaborator and friend the statistician Karl Pearson, Weldon is venting his frustration over what was the biggest beef in biology at the time: the battle between a strictly Mendelian, deterministic view of inheritance where alleles are all, as espoused by the pioneering geneticist William Bateson, and a more flexible version captured by statistics and probabilities favoured by Weldon combining variation, ancestry and environment.
If you’ve ever learned or taught genetics, there’s a high chance you started with Mendel and his work on peas, first published in German in 1865. Maybe you remember drawing out neat Punnett squares describing the various combinations of dominant and recessive alleles giving rise to the characteristic ratios of different coloured plants or seeds that Mendel counted in his garden. Purple or white blossoms, green or yellow, smooth or wrinkled peas.
But Weldon literally didn’t see life that way. When he looked at the seeds resulting from crossing pea plants, he saw fifty shades of peas - green, yellow, greenish yellow, yellowish green, and everything in between. And that’s just peas. What about all the other variation that we see in nature? None of that fits into the neat boxes of a Punnet square.
In Weldon’s opinion, Mendelian genetics simply didn’t work to explain the complexity of inheritance and the wide distribution of traits in real life organisms. But just as the argument got going and Weldon and his acolytes started to gain the upper hand over Bateson’s ‘unstatistical’ view in the debate, there was an unexpected twist…
This controversy is described in exquisite detail by Professor Greg Radick from the University of Leeds in his new book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology. I sat down for a fascinating chat with Greg to delve into the history of the war of ideas (and words) between Weldon and Bateson, and its knock-on impact on the way we’ve thought about and taught the science of heredity all the way through the 20th century to today. But we start the story not with Bateson and Weldon, but with another somewhat infamous man, who you’ve also heard me talk about before on this podcast.
Greg Radick: Disputed inheritance - Raphael Weldon, William Bateson and the battle for genetics
We delve into the history of the war of ideas between Weldon and Bateson, and its knock-on impact on the science of heredity all the way through the 20th century to today
Click here to read the full transcript…
Coming up from the Genetics Society!
The Genetics Society Spring meeting, held in collaboration with the British Society for Developmental Biology, will be running from the 15th to the 18th of April at the University of Warwick on the theme of Developmental Genetics.
The deadline for abstract submissions is the 9th of February, and early bird registration is now open for in person or virtual attendance. Head over to the events page on the Genetics Society website at genetics.org.uk, or CLICK HERE for more information and to secure your spot.
That’s all for now. Thanks to Greg Radick for what was a very long and fascinating chat. There’s so much more detail we didn’t have time to delve into, but you can get the full story from his book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology, which is out now from the University of Chicago press.
You can also catch up on our other episodes from our first series looking back on the early days of genetics, such as episode five, Vegetable Soup, where we take a closer look at Weldon’s fifty shades of peas, and episode 14, The Seeds of a Great Idea, that tells the tale of Bateson’s legendary train ride from Cambridge to London where he may have (but probably didn’t) read Mendel’s paper. Then there’s episode 16, Genetics by Numbers, which talks about the origins of the Punnett square - a teaching tool you’ll know well if you’ve ever learned Mendelian genetics. And finally, do check out episode 25, When Becky Met Bateson, which talks about the remarkable Edith Rebecca Saunders, who co-founded the Genetics Society with William Bateson in 1919. You can find links to all these episodes on the page for this podcast at geneticsunzipped.com
We’ll be back next time with the next generation - not sequencing, but up and coming genetics researchers. And in the meantime, please do fill in our listener survey at geneticsunzipped.com/survey where you can also enter for the chance to win a signed copy of my book, Rebel Cell.
For more information about this podcast including show notes, transcripts, links, references and everything else head over to geneticsunzipped.com You can find us on Twitter @geneticsunzip and if you’ve got any energy left over after that, please do take a moment to leave us a rating in the Spotify app or review us on Apple podcasts - it really makes a difference and helps more people discover the show.
This episode of Genetics Unzipped was written and presented by me, Kat Arney. It’s a First Create the Media production for The Genetics Society - one of the oldest learned societies dedicated to promoting research, training, teaching and public engagement in all areas of genetics. You can find out more and apply to join at genetics.org.uk. Our theme music was composed by Dan Pollard, and the logo was designed by James Mayall, audio production was by Emma Werner and our producer is Sally Le Page. Thanks for listening, and until next time, goodbye.
