Hosted by the Population Health Science Institute
Abstract: The celebrations of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) and his legacies in this bicentennial year have reaffirmed his place in the biological pantheon. But there is room for disagreement about how uniformly positive those legacies have been, and about whether Mendelian patterns and concepts were bound to become as central as they in fact became. In this talk I want to explore the case for thinking that, had an early twentieth-century debate over incipient “Mendelism” gone differently, scientific knowledge of heredity today would be just as powerful, and yet the central, organizing, starting-point idea of that science would be expressed not in a Punnett square (in which characters are categorical and depend on nothing but gene variants) but in a GxE diagram (in which the conditioning role of context on variable gene expression is unmissable). Drawing on recent archival research as well as on classroom experimentation, I will suggest that awareness of this alternative or “counterfactual” possibility for genetics past, with its greater emphases on phenotypic variability and multifactorial causation, can valuably help us think afresh about present-day options, especially in the teaching of genetics.
Bio: Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. Educated at Rutgers University in New Jersey (where he was born and raised) and then at Cambridge University, he has published widely in the history of the life and human sciences since 1800. His book The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago, 2007) was awarded the 2010 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize of the History of Science Society for best book in the history of the life sciences and natural history. His other books include Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (Chicago, 2023) and, as co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge, 2003; 2nd edition, 2009). He has held fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust and served as President of the British Society for the History of Science (2014‒16) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (2019‒21). He writes and lectures frequently for general audiences and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and in the PBS/National Geographic television series Genius with Stephen Hawking. In 2022 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Group.
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