Abstract
From 1902 to 1906, there was a bitter controversy in Great Britain between the Mendelians, headed by William Bateson (1861–1926), and the biometricians (ancestralists), headed by Walter Frank Raphael Weldon (1860–1906) and Karl Pearson (1857–1936). Discussions concerning evolutionary and hereditary processes were carried out in their publications, scientific meetings, and correspondence. During this period there were attempts at reconciliation between the two parties, but it did not come about. However, Eilleen Magnello (Ann Sci 55(1): 35–94, 1998) mentions that before Weldon’s premature death in 1906, he and Pearson worked jointly to find a synthesis of Mendelism and biometry, and this is apparent in Weldon’s manuscripts. This paper aims to analyze those manuscripts and other unpublished materials from Weldon to ascertain if this historiographical interpretation is true. The paper shows that Weldon’s unpublished material represented an attempt at reconciliation between Mendel and Biometry. This reinforces our argument that one of the main factors that have motivated the controversy was the struggle for authority in the field of heredity and evolution.
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- 1.
Due to the existence of a disagreement between the parties involved in several aspects such as interpretation of empirical facts, the nature of evidence, scientific theory, and methodology, we consider that the discussion between Mendelians and biometricians could be characterized as a scientific controversy (McMullin 1987).
- 2.
According to this law, parents would contribute ½ of the inheritance, the four grandparents with ¼, the eight great-grandparents with 1/8, and so on (Galton 1897, p. 76).
- 3.
We are using the term in the broad sense, including both the crossings between different species and the crossings between varieties that slightly differed, in a similar way to Mendel.
- 4.
Bateson, only succeeded in occupying an academic position in 1908 (Harvey 1985, p. 105).
- 5.
Thiselton-Dyer and Weldon considered that the cultivated forms had differentiated from a single ancestral species entirely by selection and accumulation of small variations. In contrast, Bateson thought that they had originated from hybrids between two or more of the four wild species (Cock 1973, p. 8).
- 6.
In this book Bateson accumulated a huge mass of facts that substantiated the relevance of the discontinuous variations in the evolutionary process (Martins 2013).
- 7.
Pearson considered that the principle of homotyposis was fundamental in nature and that it could be the source of heredity. He believed that blood-corpuscles, hairs, scales, spermatozoa, ova, leaves, and flowers were homotypes (Pearson et al. 1901, p. 2; Pearson 1901). In his view, heredity was a special case of homotyposis since hereditary characteristics were transmitted by gametes which, analogous to other homotypes, would be undifferentiated. For him (as for Galton and Weldon), inheritance occurred through mixing (continuous or “soft” heredity). Pearson and Weldon believed that the correlation between two or more organs that could vary, belonging to the same animal, or between the parent and progeny organs, could be calculated numerically through a theorem that had initially been used by Francis Galton in his investigations (Galton 1889).
- 8.
According to Yule, since Mendelians and biometricists were dealing with two diferent kinds of heredity, it was necessary to make a distinction between the phenomena within the race and the phenomena of hybrization that occur on crossing two races admittedly distinct. In this way, the biometry’s study of continuous variation and Bateson’s study’of discontinuous variation would not be incompatible (Yule 1902, p. 196; Tabery 2004, p. 85).
- 9.
The attempt to demonstrate the compatibility between Mendelian and biometric theories is explicit in the title of Darbishire’s paper published in 1905: “On the supposed antagonism of Mendelian to biometric theories of heredity.”
- 10.
This approach has been applied to other case studies in the history of biology. See for instance Sapp (1983, 1990). According to Jan Sapp, historians investigating the past have shown that the domestic politics of science, competition, power, and authority play important roles in directing scientific work (Sapp 1990, pp. 300–301). In his view, the competition between scientists and scientific controversies cannot be reduced to the competition of ideas whose strength will decide the outcome. The scientists are also engaged in changing the field socially. In order to receive recognition they use several strategies from teaching to refereeing papers and reviewing research grants. When scientists attempt to impose a definition of the field, each participant tends to uphold those scientific values which are most closely related to him or her personally or institutionally (Sapp 1987, p. xiv).
- 11.
In fact, in his article on the patterns of inheritance in peas, Mendel did not refer to “laws.” This connotation was given later (See Martins 2002). We will discuss this later in this chapter.
- 12.
These terms were used to refer to the reappearance of a characteristic after several generations.
- 13.
De Vries proposed intracellular pangenesis and Weismann germ-plasm theory.
- 14.
Pearson and his collaborators used to collect large samples of vegetables such as leaves of trees. They counted their veins, hairs, spines, etc. For example, they selected 100 of beech trees roughly the same age and belonging to the same district and collected 26 leaves from each one. They supposed that each tree was represented by 26 leaves. They counted the veins of theses leaves and noticed that the number varied between 10 and 22. They calculated all the possible pairs ½ (26 × 25) = 325 in number; as the correlation table was represented symmetrically considering the beginning of any of the leaves in the pair as the first or second, then a tree had 650 entries. A total of 100 trees studied resulted in 650,000 entries. They built tables by determining the correlation coefficient (Pearson 1901, p. 293; Martins and Venturineli 2011, p. 42).
- 15.
Weldon and Pearson seemed not to have realized that Bateson was developing a research program that included testing the principles Mendel had found in peas in a wide range of experimental materials, the search for exceptions and new laws (Martins 2002).
- 16.
Mendel did not present dominance as a result of the struggle between factors or cellular elements. In addition, until 1875, Galton, unlike Mendel, believed that the patent elements were transmitted more feebly than latent elements.
- 17.
After 1875 Galton dedicated himself to statistical work developing the law of ancestral heredity and changed his mind supposing that latent and patent gemmules were equally frequent and had the same chance of being transmitted to the next generation (Bulmer 2003, p. 103).
- 18.
In the case of human, lower animal, and plant characters, the correlation coefficient between a parent and its offspring was slightly less than ½ (0.45).
- 19.
Bateson made this statement in several works. See, for example, Bateson and Saunders (1902), p. 11.
- 20.
Darbishire crossed Japanese waltzing mice having pale fawn and white coats and pink eyes with ordinary white pinked eyed mice. Among the 154 produced offspring, 137 were grey and white, 1 was grey, 7 were yellow and whitish, and 9 were black and white or whitish. Although not mentioned in Darbishire’s first report, all offsprings without exception were dark-eyed. However, their parents were pink-eyed. These results conflicted with the cases of animals that have been studied so far (Darbishire 1902; Bateson 1903, p. 462).
- 21.
Weldon, UCL – Special Collections – Pearson Papers – Unpublished MS by FRW of ‘his proposed book on evolution in 13 ‘clips’.1901-1902. – 264/1. Chap. 1, p. 5.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the research support from the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the São Paulo State Research (FAPESP). Thanks are also extended to Ms. Gill Furlong from the Special Collections of University College London (UCL) and her staff.
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Martins, L.AC.P. (2020). Weldon’s Unpublished Manuscript: An Attempt at Reconciliation Between Mendelism and Biometry?. In: Baravalle, L., Zaterka, L. (eds) Life and Evolution. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39589-6_2
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