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William Bateson from Balanoglossus to Materials for the Study of Variation: The Transatlantic Roots of Discontinuity and the (un)naturalness of Selection

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Abstract

William Bateson (1861–1926) has long occupied a controversial role in the history of biology at the turn of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bateson has been situated as the British translator of Mendel or as the outspoken antagonist of W.␣F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson’s biometrics program. Less has been made of Bateson’s transition from embryologist to advocate for discontinuous variation, and the precise role of British and American influences in that transition, in the years leading up to the publication of his massive Materials for the Study of Variation (1894). In this paper, I first attempt to trace Bateson’s development in his early career before turning to search for the development of the moniker “anti-Darwinist” that has been attached to Bateson in well-known histories of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Phillip Sloan, Paul Farber, and the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thank you also to Daniel McKaughan and James Barham, who planted the initial seeds for this project.

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  1. Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Department of History, University of Notre Dame, 219 O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Erik L. Peterson

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Peterson, E.L. William Bateson from Balanoglossus to Materials for the Study of Variation: The Transatlantic Roots of Discontinuity and the (un)naturalness of Selection. J Hist Biol 41, 267–305 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-007-9137-5

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