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| The reverse of the Darwin medal. From the Royal Society website. Although intended to commend achievements, do these awards also stifle debate? |
A forgotten dispute over heredity reveals prejudice in the way true theories are established.
How does science progress? Which is also: how do we learn the truth about our world?
In the past, these questions seemed less important than what
the truth might be, or what we mean by truth.
But at least since Thomas Kuhn published his historical, sociological
work on how specific scientific revolutions happened, we’ve realised that the
actual process is worth studying.
This is different from say, ‘do atoms exist?’ We might have all sorts
of opinions on that question, but the sociology of science is interested in how
we came to believe that atoms exist, or at least that we came to care about
their existence.
And this isn’t as academic as it might first appear, as this public lecture at the Royal Society illustrated.
We heard about the role of the society
in the early days of genetics. It can seem hard to believe, but only a century
ago, not only were words like genome and DNA not yet coined, but the very idea
of genetics was new and questionable.
Genetics is a theory of heredity – a
proposed mechanism for how characteristics are inherited. And as should happen with any theory,
when it emerged, some people were sceptical.
According to Gregory Radick, the ideas of Mendel were
ignored for several years, then reappeared with venom at the turn of the
twentieth century, championed by William Bateson. His friend Raphael Weldon
disagreed, and the Royal Society, smelling a potential academic controversy, duly stirred
one.
This leads to the sociology. According to Radick, the
Society employed three 'hard Cs' in order to facilitate progress– communications
(better, controversy, I think); committees and commendations. In short, it emerged that Bateson
was the better controversialist, manipulated the channels of patronage and then
capped his victory by receiving the prestigious Darwin Prize and effectively
closing debate.
OK, that’s putting it far too cynically, and the
disagreement was much less rancorous than my summary suggests. But the
confirmation of the truth of Mendelism didn’t happen by experts recognising it
as true, through an exhaustive intellectual debate.
In fact, Radick claims that with Weldon’s premature death,
his masterful alternative to Mendelism wasn’t published, a sad fact Radick and
his colleagues at the University of Leeds intend to rectify soon.
Does it matter? We now accept Mendel discovered the truth,
even if we have a significantly modified version of his basic idea. But its in
the modifications that we see the results of this early debate, and others.
Bateson – and his followers – apparently incorporated the early criticisms into
their new version of heredity.
Then it’s a question of counterfactual. What would have
happened if the debate had run differently, and Weldon had won it?
As Mendelism is true, we would expect some version of it to
have survived regardless. But perhaps a Weldonian version of heredity would
incorporate Mendel’s insights yet be more broadly in line with our current
complex view of genetics. This, at least, is what Radick claims.
He plans to produce, in the long term, a textbook that will
adopt a broadly Weldonian approach to genetics. Then, we will be able to see
for ourselves how much the Royal Society may have influenced our
understanding of the truth.
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