Leeds Philosophical & Literary Society
Free public lecture: 25 October 2023 7:30pm
Disputed inheritance: the battle over Mendel and the future of biology
A root-and-branch rethinking of how history has shaped the science of genetics
Speaker: Professor Gregory Radick, University of Leeds
Location: University of Leeds Business School, Maurice Keyworth Lecture Theatre (G.02),
Campus map location here
Attendance is free – but please reserve your place here
(NB Zoom link for remote viewing is supplied upon registration)
Summary:
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.
In his new book Disputed Inheritance (published August 2023), Gregory Radick turns that message on its head. He shows that 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 Cambridge biologist William Bateson, who, in Mendel’s name, wanted biology and society reorganised 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. Radick suggests that it was Weldon’s untimely death in 1906, before he could finish a book setting out his alternative vision, that 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.
HPS Leeds 