Event Description
In 1900, few had heard of Gregor Mendel. Ten years later, he was famous as the father of genetics. Even today, Mendelian ideas serve as a standard entry point 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.
Gregory Radick will discuss his latest book, Disputed Inheritance, which turns the inherited narrative on its head. Radick attributes Mendelism not to Mendel’s own work, but to the outcome of a ferocious debate between two English biologists in the early 20th century. On one side was William Bateson, who, in Mendel’s name, wanted biology and society reorganized around the recognition that heredity is destiny. On the other was W. F. R. Weldon, who thought Bateson’s “Mendelism” pushed knowledge of the modifying role of environments to the margins.
Weldon died before he could finish a book detailing his alternative vision. Had Weldon lived, Radick argues, we might still talk of “genes,” but without the deterministic notion that the presence of a particular DNA variant is sufficient to determine if someone is born to be aggressive, alcoholic, blue-eyed, doomed to breast cancer, or crave caffeine. Instead, our gene talk would be routinely hedged with talk of internal and external contexts, because a gene would be seen as something with variable effects depending on the mix of other causes in play.
Event Speaker
Gregory Radick, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
Sponsoring Organizations:
- Columbia University in the City of New York
- NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
- The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- The New York Academy of Medicine
- The New York Academy of Sciences
