Abstract
Along with Pearson, Weldon is best known as leading the Biometric school to resist the Mendelian approach, mainly developed by Bateson, to the study of heredity in the first decade of the twentieth century. Accordingly, the examinations of Weldon’s work are typically framed within the context of the Mendelian-Biometrician controversy. This chapter revisits the significance of Weldon’s work in the history of genetics by examining Weldon’s view on inheritance and its development. Firstly, I critically review the traditional historiography of Weldon. Then, I sketch an outline of Weldon’s later work on inheritance. Finally, I discuss the differences between Pearson’s and Weldon’s views on inheritance and science, and suggest a new reading of Weldon’s work.
Weldon’s most sustained statement of [the] developmentalist, interactionist perspective on inheritance lies buried away in a manuscript entitled Theory of inheritance that he left unpublished and indeed uncompleted at his death in 1906.
(Jamieson and Radick 2017, 1263)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that these reports were written by an unknown author.
- 2.
Weldon delivered a series of eight lectures on the subject of theories of heredity at UCL on 22/11/1904, 29/11/1904, 06/12/1904, 13/12/1904, 24/01/1905, 31/01/1905, 07/02/1905, and 14/02/1905 respectively.
- 3.
Note that Weldon’s “Note on the offspring of thoroughbred chestnut mares” (1906b) was still basically a critique of Mendelism.
- 4.
As Olby (1989, 315) correctly indicates, the content of Theory of Inheritance and “Current Theories of Hereditary Processes” correspond to each other to a great extent. So it can be inferred that Weldon might have planned to write one or two chapters on chromosomes, given that there were two unpublished manuscripts on chromosomes (one is entitled “Individuality of the Chromosomes”, and the other “The Hypothesis of the Individuality of the Chromosomes and Mendelism”) and the fifth lecture of “Current Theories of Hereditary Processes” was about chromosomes.
- 5.
Froggatt and Nevin (1971, 21) suggests that the objective of Weldon’s and Darbishire’s breeding experiments on mice was more than a test of the Mendelian principles. Rather it was to formulate a general law of inheritance, which would embrace the entire spectrum of heredity such that “the Mendelians were merely working at one end of the scale, the biometricians somewhat further down” (Pearson 1908, 93). It is undeniable that the breeding experiments on mice might had been useful for Weldon’s unfinished project on a general theory of inheritance. However, it seems too hasty to me to conclude that Weldon had such an aim in mind when he began experimenting mice in 1901, as the early publications on mice breeding (e.g. Darbishire 1902, 1903a, b, 1904; Weldon 1903) focused on the examination of the Mendelian principles.
- 6.
For a short summary of Galton’s theory of hereditary determinant elements, see Sect. 4.3.4.
- 7.
It should be highlighted that Mendel (1866) did not have the law of dominance or the law of segregation. This was Weldon’s reformulation of Mendel’s laws, which was criticised by the Mendelians. For example, Bateson (1909, 13) indicated that “[t]hose who first read of Mendel’s work most unfortunately fell into the error of enunciating a ‘Law of Dominance’ as a proposition comparable with the discovery of segregation. Mendel himself enunciates no such law.”
- 8.
Olby (1989, 315) provides a dispositional interpretation: “Weldon uses the word ‘dominance’ to mean that power which causes a determinant to be expressed.”
References
Barnes, Barry. 1980. On the Causal Explanation of Scientific Judgment. Social Science Information 19 (4/5): 685–695.
Bateson, William. 1902. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1909. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Current Theories of the Hereditary Process”. 1905. The Lancet 165 (4245): 42.
Darbishire, Arthur Dunkinfield. 1902. Note on the Results of Crossing Japanese Waltzing Mice with European Albino Races. Biometrika 2 (1): 101–104.
———. 1903a. Second Report on the Result of Crossing Japanese Waltzing Mice with European Albino Races. Biometrika 2 (2): 165–173.
———. 1903b. Third Report on Hybrids Between Waltzing Mice and Albino Races: On the Result of Crossing Japanese Waltzing Mice with ‘Extracted’ Recessive Albinos. Biometrika 2 (3): 282–285.
———. 1904. On the Result of Crossing Japanese Waltzing with Albino Mice. Biometrika 3 (1): 1–51.
———. 1906. On the Difference between Physiological and Statistical Laws of Heredity. Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Library and Philosophical Society 50 (11): 1–44.
Delage, Yves. 1903. L’hérédité et les Grands Problèmes de la Biologie Générale. 2nd ed. Paris: Schleicher Frères.
Driesch, Hans. 1897. Studien über das Regulationsvermögen der Organismen 1. Von den Regulativen Wachsthums- und Differenzirungsfähigkeiten der Tubularia. Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 5 (3): 389–418.
Farrall, Lyndsay A. 1975. Controversy and Conflict in Science : A Case Study – The English Biometric School and Mendel’s Laws. Social Studies of Science 5 (3): 269–301.
Froggatt, Peter, and Norman C. Nevin. 1971. The ‘Law of Ancestral Heredity’ and the Mendelian-Ancestrian Controversy in England, 1889–1906. Journal of Medical Genetics 8 (1): 1–36.
Galton, Francis. 1872a. On Blood-Relationship. Proceedings of the Royal Society 20: 394–402.
———. 1872b. On Blood-Relationship. Nature 6: 173–176.
———. 1889. Natural Inheritance. London and New York: Macmillan & Company.
———. 1897. The Average Contribution of Each Several Ancestor to the Total Heritage of the Offspring. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 61: 401–413.
Hertwig, O., and R. Hertwig. 1887. Über den Befruchtungs- und Teilungsvorgang des tierischen Eies unter dem Einfluß äußerer Agentien. Jenaische Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaft 13: 120–241.
Jamieson, Annie, and Gregory Radick. 2013. Putting Mendel in His Place: How Curriculum Reform in Genetics and Counterfactual History of Science Can Work Together. In The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, edited by Kostas Kampourakis, 577–95. Dordrecht: Springer.
———. 2017. Genetic Determinism in the Genetics Curriculum. Science & Education 26 (10): 1261–90.
MacKenzie, Donald A., and S. Barry Barnes. 1975. Biometriker versus Mendelianer. Eine Kontroverse und ihre Erklärung. In Wissenschaftssoziologie: Studien und Materialien, edited by Nico Stehr and René König, 165–196. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Mendel, Gregor. 1866. Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden. Verhandlungen des Naturforschenden Vereins Brünn IV (1865) (Abhandlungen): 3–47.
Morgan, Thomas Hunt. 1902a. Experimental Studies of the Internal Factors of Regeneration in the Earthworm. Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 14 (3–4): 562–591.
———. 1902b. The Reflexes Connected with Autotomy in the Hermit-Crab. American Journal of Physiology 6 (5): 278–282.
Norton, Bernard J. 1975. Biology and Philosophy: The Methodological Foundations of Biometry. Journal of the History of Biology 8 (1): 85–93.
Olby, Robert Cecil. 1989. The Dimensions of Scientific Discovery: The Biometric-Mendelian Debate. The British Journal for the History of Science 22 (3): 299–320.
Pearson, Karl. 1898. Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution. On the Law of Ancestral Heredity. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 62: 386–412.
———. 1900. The Grammar of Science. 2nd ed. London: Adam and Charles Black.
———. 1903. The Law of Ancestral Heredity. Biometrika 2 (2): 211–229.
———. 1908. On a Mathematical Theory of Determinantal Inheritance, from Suggestions and Notes of the Late W. F. R. Weldon. Biometrika 6 (1): 80–93.
Pearson, Karl, and Alice Lee. 1900. “Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution. VIII. On the Inheritance of Characters Not Capable of Exact Quantitative Measurement. Part I. Introductory. Part II. On the Inheritance of Coat-Colour in Horses. Part III. On the Inheritance of Eye-Co.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character, 195: 79–150.
Pence, Charles H. 2011. ‘Describing Our Whole Experience’: The Statistical Philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (4): 475–485.
Radick, Gregory. 2005. Other Histories, Other Biologies. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 (56): 3–47.
———. 2016a. Presidential Address: Experimenting with the Scientific Past. The British Journal for the History of Science 49 (2): 153–172.
———. 2016b. Teach Students the Biology of Their Time. Nature 533 (7603): 293–293.
Roll-Hansen, Nils. 1980. The Controversy between Biometricians and Mendelians: A Test Case for the Sociology for Scientific Knowledge. Social Science Information 19 (3): 501–517.
Russo, Federica, and Jon Williamson. 2007. Interpreting Causality in the Health Sciences. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (2): 157–170.
Sloan, Philip R. 2000. Mach’s Phenomenalism and the British Reception of Mendelism. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences – Series III – Sciences de la Vie 323: 1069–1079.
von Guita, Georg. 1898. Versuche mit Kreuzungen von Verschiedenen Rassen der Hausmaus. Bericht der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Freiburg 10: 317–332.
———. 1900. Versuche mit Kreuzungen von Verschiedenen Rassen der Hausmaus. Bericht der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Freiburg 11: 131–138.
Weldon, Walter Frank Rapheal. 1895. Remarks on Variation in Animals and Plants. To Accompany the First Report of the Committee for Conducting Statistical Inquiries into the Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 57: 379–382.
———. 1902a. Mendel’s Laws of Alternative Inheritance in Peas. Biometrika 1 (2): 228–254.
———. 1902b. On the Ambiguity of Mendel’s Categories. Biometrika 2 (1): 44–55.
———. 1903. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity in Mice. Nature 68 (1750): 34.
———. 1905. Theory of Inheritance (Unpublished). London: UCL Library.
———. 1906a. Inheritance in Animals and Plants. In Letures on the Method of Science, edited by Thomas Banks Strong, 81–109. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1906b. Note on the Offspring of Thoroughbred Chestnut Mares. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 77 (519): 394–398.
Weldon, Walter Frank Rapheal, Karl Pearson, and Charles B. Davenport. 1901a. Editorial: The Scope of Biometrika. Biometrika 1 (1): 1–2.
———. 1901b. Editorial: The Spirit of Biometrika. Biometrika 1 (1): 3–6.
Williamson, Jon. 2019. Estabishing Causal Claims in Medicine. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (1): 33–61.
Yule, G. Udny. 1902. Mendel’s Laws and Their Probable Relations to Intra-Racial Heredity. New Phytologist 1 (10): 222–238.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shan, Y. (2020). Weldon’s Choice Reconsidered. In: Doing Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: A Case Study of the Origin of Genetics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50617-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50617-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50616-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50617-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)