Karl Pearson's mathematization of inheritance: from ancestral heredity to Mendelian genetics (1895-1909)

Annals of Science
M E Magnello

Abstract

Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he 'accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel' as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. Moreover, in 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were 'too good to be true', Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded...Continue Reading

References

Feb 25, 1978·Lancet·K Swineburne
Mar 1, 1971·Journal of Medical Genetics·P Froggatt, N C Nevin
Jan 1, 1971·History of Science; an Annual Review of Literature, Research and Teaching·P Froggatt, N C Nevin
Mar 1, 1996·British Journal for the History of Science·M E Magnello

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Citations

Dec 4, 2008·Journal of the History of Biology·Brad D Hume
Dec 15, 2011·British Journal for the History of Science·Chris Renwick
Jul 5, 2013·Genetics·A W F Edwards
Nov 1, 2011·Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences·Charles H Pence
May 17, 2001·American Journal of Botany·D J Fairbanks, B Rytting
Aug 5, 2016·Journal of Investigative Medicine : the Official Publication of the American Federation for Clinical Research·John Concato, John A Hartigan

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