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interactionist perspective on inheritance lies buried away in a manuscript entitled Theory of inheritance that he left unpublished and indeed uncompleted at his death in 1906.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)
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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can be inferred that Weldon might have planned to write one or two chapters on chromosomes, given that there were two unpublished manuscripts on chromosomes (one is entitled “Individuality of the Chromosomes”, and the other “The Hypothesis of the Individuality of the Chromosomes and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.”
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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
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