Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T17:44:47.580Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Dimensions of Scientific Controversy: The Biometric—Mendelian Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Robert Olby
Robert Olby
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The increasing attention which has been given to social history of science and to the sociological analysis of scientific activity has resulted in a renewed interest in scientific controversies. Furthermore, the rejection of the presentist view of history, according to which those contestants who took what we can identify, with the benefit of modern knowledge, as the ‘right’ stand in a controversy, were right and their opponents were ‘wrong’, left the subject of scientific controversies with many questions. What determines their emergence, course and resolution? When Froggatt and Nevin wrote on the Bio-metric-Mendelian controversy in 1971 they called their article ‘descriptive rather than interpretative’, so they avoided the very questions we would like to ask. Provine, in the same year, concentrated on the strong personalities of the contestants, their clashes, and the scientific arguments in play. But in 1975 Mackenzie and Barnes argued that the controversy could not be accounted for unless recourse was had to sociological factors. Their view has become widely known and figured prominently in 1982 in Steven Shapin's recital of the empirical achievements of the application of the sociological approach. I have returned to this subject because I do not yet feel altogether convinced by Mackenzie and Barnes' analysis. Even if their analysis of the controversy between Pearson and Bateson be accepted, it is not so obvious how effectively it can be used to explain the controversy between Weldon and Bateson, and I am not confident that it is adequate for an understanding of the evolution of their differing views of the mechanism of evolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 299 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Froggatt, P. and Nevin, N.C., ‘The “Law of Ancestral Heredity” and the Mendelian-Ancestrian Controversy in England 1889–1906’ Journal of Medical Genetics (1971), viii, p. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Provine, W.B., The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Chicago, 1871, chapters 11, 111, IV.Google Scholar

3 Mackenzie, D. and Barnes, S.B. ‘Biometriker versus Mendelianer. Eine Kontroverse und ihre Erklarung’, Kölner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (1975), Sonderheft 13, section iv, pp. 165–196Google Scholar, see especially section iv, p. 180 ff. This is the German translation (referred to in future as Kontroverse) of the unpublished English typescript: ‘Historical and Sociological Analyses of Scientific Change: The Case of the Mendelian-Biometrician Controversy in England’, pp. 1–66, which the authors duplicated and distributed in 1974. The reason for giving this source precedence over later more accessible papers is that it offers the most detailed account of their analysis of this debate. However, we shall refer to the revised account by Mackenzie in 1981 (see note 20). The authors' essay: ‘Scientific Judgement: The Biometry-Mendelism Controversy’, in Barnes, S.B. and Shaplin, S. (eds) Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, Beverley Hills and London, 1979, pp. 191–210Google Scholar is inadequate for our purposes.

4 Shapin, S., ‘History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions’, History of Science (1982), 20, pp. 157–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Bateson, W., ‘Presidential Address’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, (1904), 74, 574–592.Google Scholar Reprinted in Bateson, B. (ed) William Bateson, F.R.S. Naturalist, his Essays and Addresses, Cambridge, 1928, pp. 233–259.Google Scholar (This work will be referred to in future as Life.)

6 Bateson, W., Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Cambridge, 1909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bateson gave his readers the impression that biometric methods had been shown to be inappropriate to studies of heredity (pp. 6–7).

7 Bateson, W., Mendel's Principles of Heredity, a Defence, Cambridge, 1902.Google Scholar

8 Lankester, E.R., ‘The Utility of Specific Characters’, Nature (1896), 54, p. 366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Kevles, D.J., ‘Genetics in the United States and Great Britain 1890–1930: A Review with Speculation’, in Webster, C. (ed) Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 193–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Pearson, E., Karl Pearson: An Appreciation of some Aspects of his Life and Work, Cambridge, 1938, p. 36.Google Scholar

11 Searle, G.R., ‘Eugenics and Class’Google Scholar, in Webster, , op. cit. (9), pp. 217–242.Google Scholar

12 Roll-Hansen, N., ‘The Controversy between Biometricians and Mendelians: A Test Case for the Sociology of Knowledge’, Social Science Information (1980), 19, 501–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Barnes, S.B., ‘On the Causal Explanation of Scientific Judgement’, Social Science Information (1980), 19, pp. 685–695.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Norton, B., ‘Biology and Philosophy: The Methodological Foundations of Biometry’, Journal of the History of Biology (1975), 8, 85–93Google Scholar, and his ‘Metaphysics and Population Genetics: Karl Pearson and the Background to Fisher's Multi-factorial Theory of Inheritance’, Annals of Science (1975), 32, pp. 537–553Google Scholar, and his thesis, Karl Pearson and the Galtonian Tradition: Studies in the Rise of Quantitative Social Biology, Ph.D. Dissertation, London, 1978.Google Scholar

14 Norton to Mackenzie, undated letter, probably 1974. It relates to Pearson rather than specifically to the controversy between biometricians and Mendelians.

15 Kontroverse, p. 179Google Scholar, English text, p. 34.

16 Kontroverse, p. 175Google Scholar, English text, p. 26.

17 Kontroverse, p. 180Google Scholar, English text, pp. 35, 36.

18 Idem.

19 Norton, B., ‘Book Reviews’, British Journal for the History of Science (1983), 16, p. 304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Mackenzie, D., Statistics in Britain. The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge, Edinburgh, 1981, p. 6.Google Scholar Evidently statistical evidence of the kind deployed by Durkheim in his study of suicide is not, according to Mackenzie, required of a structural sociological hypothesis.

21 Kontroverse, p. 190Google Scholar, English text, p. 57.

22 Kontroverse, p. 189Google Scholar, English translation, p. 55.

23 Norton, , op. cit. (19), p. 306.Google Scholar

24 Shapin, , op. cit. (4), p. 197.Google Scholar

25 Barnes, S.B., Interest and the Growth of Knowledge, London, 1977, p. 57.Google Scholar

26 Barnes, , op. cit. (25), p. 58.Google Scholar

27 Idem.

28 Barnes, , op. cit. (25), p. 45.Google Scholar

29 Barnes, , op. cit. (25), p. 62.Google Scholar

30 Mackenzie, , op. cit. (20), pp. 136–137.Google Scholar

31 Kontroverse, p. 182Google Scholar, English translation, p. 40.

32 Bateson to W. Branford, Secretary of the Sociological Society, Bateson's copy of letter dated 4 May 1904. Bateson Papers, No. 813, John Innes Institute, Norwich (also available as No. D28A, Coleman Collection, Cambridge University Library).

33 Bateson, W., ‘Biological Fact and the Structure of Society’, in Life, op. cit. (5), p. 341.Google Scholar

34 Bateson, W., ‘Common-sense in Racial Problems’, 1919, reprinted in Life, op. cit. (5), p. 378 ff.Google Scholar

35 Lock, R.H., Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 2nd edn, London, 1909, p. 283.Google Scholar

36 Stigler, S.M., The History of Statistics. The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, pp. 337–338.Google Scholar

37 Mackenzie, and Barnes, , op. cit. (3), p. 36.Google Scholar

38 Crowther, J.G., British Scientists of the Twentieth Century, London, 1952, p. 256.Google Scholar Crowther states on p. 289: ‘He [Bateson] was of comfortable middle-class Liberal origin, descended from well-to-do North of England trading families. He was not well-off himself, but he had the ideology of a class which regarded automatic provision of living and education for its members as one of their natural rights’.

39 Kontroverse, p. 180Google Scholar, English text, p. 36. Barnes went so far as to suggest that Bateson's hostility to eugenics was engendered by the interests of class and occupation dependent upon the traditional order, land rather than manufacture, the country rather than the city, scriptural rather than scientistic authority…' Barnes, , op. cit. (25), p. 60Google Scholar. Presumably he was referring to Bateson's membership of St John's College Cambridge, a wealthy land-owning, Anglican foundation. Bateson, like the other Mendelians, was not a landowner, and he was decidedly agnostic towards religion.

40 As others have pointed out, Bateson did not agree with the old academic élite on the subject of university degrees for women.

41 Bateson, W., ‘The Ancestry of the Chordates’, Quarterly Journal of microscopical Science, (1886), 26, pp. 539–540.Google Scholar

42 Bateson, W., Materials for the Study of Variation Treated with especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species, London, 1894, p. 9.Google Scholar

43 Bateson, W., op. cit. (41), p. 536. (?)Google Scholar

44 Mayr, E., The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Cambridge, Mass., 1982, p. 545.Google Scholar

45 Bateson, W., op. cit. (43), p. 574.Google Scholar He wrote The only way in which we may hope to get at the truth is by the organization of systematic experiments in breeding, a class of research that calls perhaps for more patience and more resources than any other form of biological enquiry'.

46 Meijer, O.G., ‘De Vries no Mendelian’, Annals of Science, (1985), 42, pp. 189–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Bateson, W. and Bateson, A., ‘On the Variations in Floral Symmetry of Certain Plants having Irregular Corollas’, Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany), (1891), 28, p. 158.Google Scholar See also: Bateson, W., op.cit. (42), p. 77.Google Scholar

48 For the fullest account see: Pearson, K., ‘Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, 1860–1906’, Biometrika (1906), 5, pp. 1–52.Google Scholar Reprinted in Pearson, E.S. and Kendall, M.G. (eds), Studies in the History of Statistics and Probability, London, 1970, pp. 265–321.Google Scholar

49 Bateson, W. to Bateson, A., letter dated 2.ix.1888, in Life, op. cit. (5), p. 39.Google Scholar

50 Galton, F., Natural Inheritance, London, 1889.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Galton, F., ‘Co-relations and their Measurement, Chiefly from Anthropological Data’, Proceedings of the royal Society, (1888), 40, pp. 135–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Weldon, W.F.R., ‘The Variations occurring in certain Decapod Crustacea. I. Crangon vulgaris’, Proceedings of the royal Society, (1890), 47, pp. 445–453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Certain correlated Variations in Crangon Vulgaris’, Proceedings of the royal Society, (1892), 51, pp. 2–21.Google Scholar

53 Pearson, E.S., op. cit. (10), p. 19.Google Scholar

54 Stigler, , op. cit. (36), p. 304.Google Scholar

55 Weldon, W.F.R., ‘Variation and Selection’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 10th edn (The Times Supplements to the Ninth Edition), 33, p. 637.Google Scholar

56 Weldon, to Bateson, letter dated 28.ix.1888, p. 10. Bateson Papers, No. 186. John Innes Institute, Norwich. (Coleman Collection No. B13)

57 Bateson, W. to Bateson, B., letter dated 16.iv.1906, in Life, op. cit. (5), p. 102.Google Scholar

58 Bateson, W. and Bateson, A., op. cit. (47), p. 159.Google Scholar

59 Life, p. 28.Google Scholar

60 Southward, A.J. and Roberts, E.K., ‘The Marine Biological Association 1884–1984: One Hundred Years of Marine Biology’, Report on the Transactions of the Devon Association for the Advancement of Science, (1984), 116, pp. 155–199.Google Scholar Reprinted as Occasional Publication, No. 3 of the MBL, Plymouth.

61 Garstang, W., ‘On the Variation, Races and Migration of the Mackerel’, Journal of the marine biological Association, U.K., (1898), 5, pp. 235–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Garstang discussed the question debated since the 1880s as to whether mackerel around our shores constitute a single race which separates only seasonally into two races, one composed of larger, the other of smaller sized fish, or whether two races exist.

62 Holt, E.W.L., ‘An Examination of the present State of the Grimsby Trawl Fishery, with especial Reference to the Destruction of immature Fish’, Journal of the marine biological Association, U.K., (1895), 97, pp. 360–379.Google Scholar

63 Weldon, W.F.R. ‘On Variation in the Herring’ (unpublished), Pearson Papers, 263/1, University College London.Google Scholar

64 Weldon, , op. cit. (52)Google Scholar, and ‘Attempt to Measure the Death-rate due to the Selective Destruction of Carcinus moenas with respect to a particular Dimension’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1895), 97, pp. 360–379.Google Scholar

65 Lefevre, G., ‘William Keith Brooks. A Sketch of his Life by some of his former Pupils and Associates’, Journal of experimental Zoology, (1910), 9, p. 6–8.Google Scholar Brooks' influence is discussed in Allen, G.E., Thomas Hunt Morgan. The Man and his Science, Princeton, 1978, pp. 35 ff.Google Scholar

66 Brooks, W.K., The Law of Heredity. A Study of the Cause of Variation, and the Origin of Living Organisms, Baltimore, 1883, p. 86.Google Scholar Brooks did not hold the same position on all these points in his Foundations of Zoology, New York, 1899Google Scholar. In his opposition to the biometricians he was consistent and may well have influenced Bateson, although his grounds for opposition were not the same as Bateson's.

67 Weismann, A., The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity, London, 1893, pp. 412–413.Google Scholar Cited in Robinson, G., A Prelude to Genetics, Theories of a Material Substance of Heredity: Darwin to Weismann, Lawrence, 1979, p. 99.Google Scholar

68 Life, op. cit. (5), p. 30.Google Scholar

69 Life, op. cit. (5), p. 34.Google Scholar

70 Coleman, W., ‘Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative Thought in Science’, Centauras (1970) 15, pp. 228–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 Kevles, D., op. cit. (9)Google Scholar and Pearson, E., op. cit. (10).Google Scholar

72 For an account of Weldon's first encounter with Natural inheritance at the MBL in Plymouth see Bourne, G.C., ‘Obituary Notices’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, (1905–1906), p. 112.Google Scholar

73 Weldon, W.F.R., ‘Presidential Address’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, (1898), 68, pp. 887–902.Google Scholar

74 Weldon, , op. cit. (58).Google Scholar

75 Weldon, , ‘Inheritance in Animals and Plants’, in Strong, T.B. (ed) Lectures on the Method of Science, Oxford, 1906.Google Scholar

76 Darbishire, A.D., ‘Note on the Results of Crossing Japanese Waltzing Mice with European Albino Races’, Biometrika, (1902), 2, pp. 101–104, 165–173Google Scholar; ‘On the Results of Crossing Japanese Waltzing with Albino Mice’, Biometrika, (1903), 3, pp. 1–51.Google Scholar See also: Weldon, F.J. and Pearson, K., ‘W.F.R. Weldon's Mice Breeding Experiments, Records of Matings Prepared for Press by F.J.W. and K.P.’, Biometrika, (1915), 11, Appendix, pp. 1–60.Google Scholar

77 Pearson, K. and Usher, C.H., ‘Albinism in Dogs’, Biometrika, (1929), 21, pp. 144–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also: Pearson, E., op. cit. (10), p. 58.Google Scholar

78 Tschermak, E., ‘Die Theorie der Kryptomerie und des Kryptohybridismus’, Beihefte zum botanischen Zenfrablatt, (1903), 16, pp. 11–35.Google Scholar For Tschermak's remarks on the Biometrician-Mendelian debate see his: ‘Der gegenwärtige Stand der Mendelschen Lehre und die Arbeiten von Bateson’, Zeitschrift für das land wirtschaftliche Versuchswesen in Österreich, (1902), 12, 1365–1392.Google Scholar

79 See Weldon's notebooks in the Pearson Papers, 264/2, University College London.

80 Weldon, W.F.R., ‘Theory of Inheritance’Google Scholar, Pearson Papers, 264/2, University College London.

81 Bateson, W., op. cit. (5).Google Scholar

82 ‘Current Theories of the Hereditary Process’, The Lancet, (1905), pp. 42, 180, 307–308, 512, 584–585, 657, 732, 810.Google Scholar

83 Pearson, K., ‘On a Mathematical Theory of Determinantal Inheritance, from Suggestions and Notes of the Late W. F. R. Weldon’, Biometrika, (1908), 6, pp. 80–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an excellent exposition of this theory, see Norton's Ph.D. thesis, op. cit. (note 13), pp. 191–193.

84 op. cit. (82), p. 732.Google Scholar

85 op. cit. (82), p. 657.Google Scholar

86 Weldon, , op. cit. (80), p. 9.Google Scholar

87 Weldon, , op. cit. (80), p. 16.Google Scholar

88 I am grateful to Mark Adams for raising this possibility.

89 Morgan, T.H., ‘The Assumed Purity of the Germ Cells in Mendelian Results’, Science, (1905), 22, pp. 877–879.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

90 Pearson, K., op. cit. (48), p. 2.Google Scholar

91 E.R. Lankester to Bateson, letter dated 17.ii.1889. Bateson Papers, No. 5, John Innes Institute, Norwich (Coleman Collection, No. A1B).

92 Crowther, J.G., op. cit. (38), p. 289.Google Scholar

93 Barnes, S.B., op. cit. (25), p. 63.Google Scholar

94 Mackenzie, D., op. cit. (20), p. 224.Google Scholar See also p. 6, where he writes ‘Psychological make-up, accident and other similar factors were undoubtedly operative in each individual case’.

95 Butler, Samuel (1835–1902)Google Scholar, grandson of Butler, Samuel (1774–1839)Google Scholar. Headmaster of Shrewsbury School and Bishop of Lichfield. The former wrote: Life and Habit, London, 1878Google Scholar, and Evolution, Old and New, London. 1879Google Scholar, Luck or Cunning? as the Means of Organic Modification, London, 1887Google Scholar, also Erewhon, London, 1872Google Scholar, and The Way of All Flesh, London, 1903.Google Scholar

96 Pearson, K., op. cit. (48), p. 2.Google Scholar It should be noted that although Huxley enthusiastically championed natural selection he did allow for some evolution by discontinuous variation. Weldon never commented on this point!

97 Mackenzie was inclined to give more weight to the role of skills associated with different trainings in op. cit. (20), pp. 125–129. He concluded ‘… detailed technical judgements made by the two sides reflect at least in part the social interests of the groups of scientific practitioners with differing skills’. Mackenzie's essay ‘Sociobiologies in Competition: the Biometrician-Mendelian Debate’, in Webster, op. cit (9), pp. 243–288Google Scholar, is identical with chapter vi of Mackenzie's Statistics in Britain, 1.e. op. cit. (20).

98 See: Bowler, P., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, 1983.Google Scholar