Abstract
Textbook presentations of genetics have changed remarkably little since their earliest days. Typically an initial chapter introduces Mendel’s pea-hybridization experiments and the lessons (‘laws’) drawn from them. Then, in succeeding chapters, those lessons are gradually qualified and supplemented out of existence. The case of dominance is an especially well-discussed example of a concept that has survived in genetics pedagogy despite its diminishing role in genetic theory and practice. To clarify the costs of continuing to organize knowledge of heredity in traditionally Mendelian ways, this chapter recalls criticisms of Mendelism that were made at its start but have since been lost. The criticisms came from the Oxford zoologist W. F. R. Weldon (1860–1906). Although remembered now as a ‘biometrician’, Weldon was by training an embryologist, who toward the end of his life drew upon the latest experimental studies of animal development in order to suggest an alternative and, in his view, superior concept of dominance to that found in Mendel’s work. Weldon’s dissent from Mendelism could well serve to inspire those attempting now to cast Mendelian tradition aside in order to reshape genetics teaching for a genomic age.
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Notes
- 1.
See Skopek (2011) on the birth and early career of the start-with-Mendel strategy among writers of textbooks in genetics.
- 2.
Although we shall concentrate on dominance here, other aspects of traditional Mendelian pedagogy have also been criticized. As Kampourakis (2013) has shown, the presentation of the process of science is also flawed, promoting, as it does, a view of Mendel as a lone pioneer, rather than as the author of one contribution to the social activity that is science.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The authors are currently working on an annotated edition of Weldon’s manuscript.
- 7.
On heredity-environment interactions in Galton’s work and Mendel’s, see Radick (2011).
- 8.
- 9.
The strategy outlined here has affinities with that advocated in Dougherty 2009. Of course, the very concept of the ‘gene’ is problematic; see Burian and Kampourakis, this volume, for discussion of an alternative way to conceptualize the material of heredity.
- 10.
On the problems of genetic determinism see Lewontin (1993); see also Moore, this volume.
- 11.
On the critique of “genetic basis” talk see Kitcher (1997, ch. 11, esp. p. 251); on the concept of heritability, and why the nature/nurture dichotomy no longer holds explanatory power in biology, see Moore, this volume.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the British Academy for the Small Research Grant that funded our work on Weldon’s manuscript; to UCL Special Collections for permission to quote from that manuscript; to the Uses and Abuses of Biology programme at The Faraday Institute for Science & Religion, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, for funding the ongoing pedagogic project described above; to Andrew Cuming, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, for much helpful discussion; and to Kostas Kampourakis for his exemplary editorial support. An earlier version of Sects. 3 and 4 appeared as part of Greg Radick’s inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds, “Scientific Inheritance: How History Matters for the Sciences,” 16 May 2012 (available at http://lutube.leeds.ac.uk/clasew/videos/8153).
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Jamieson, A., Radick, G. (2013). Putting Mendel in His Place: How Curriculum Reform in Genetics and Counterfactual History of Science Can Work Together. In: Kampourakis, K. (eds) The Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_25
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