Disputed Inheritance (Paperback)

Gregory Radick

ISBN 10: 0226822729 / ISBN 13: 9780226822723

Published by The University of Chicago Press, 2023

About this Item

Paperback. 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 hereditygenetics. 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 Mendels garden. Disputed Inheritance turns that message on its head. As Gregory Radick shows, Mendelian ideas became foundational not because they match realitylittle in nature behaves like Mendels peasbut 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 Mendels 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. 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780226822723

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Disputed Inheritance (Paperback)
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226822729
• ISBN 13: 9780226822723
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Gregory Radick is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds.