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UGI Seminar: Gregory Radick: Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology
26 February 2025, 3:00 pm–4:00 pm
It's well known that after 1900, a fight broke out over Gregor Mendel's recently rediscovered paper on crossbred peas. On the one side were the "Mendelians," led by the Cambridge biologist William Bateson, who reckoned that Mendel's paper changed everything for biology and society. On the other side, the most brilliant and implacable critic was the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon, whose heart belonged to UCL (where he had worked through the 1890s), and whose unexpected death in 1906 at the age of 46 left the book setting out his alternative perspective on inheritance unfinished and unpublished. In this talk I'll draw on my recent book on the Bateson-Weldon debate and its legacies to make a case for this debate as a "sliding doors" moment in the scientific past, when biology came surprisingly and — for purposes of rethinking aspects of those legacies — instructively close to taking an interestingly different path from the one it actually took.
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Organiser
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Pooja Swali
Seminar Speaker: Professsor Gregory Radick, University of Leeds
Date: Wednesday, 26 February at 3pm
Venue: Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building
Title Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology
About the Speaker
Professor Gregory Radick
at University of Leeds
Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His books include The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007, awarded the 2010 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize), Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (2023, shortlisted for the 2024 Pickstone Prize) and, as co-author, Darwin's Argument by Analogy: From Artificial to Natural Selection (with Roger White and Jonathan Hodge, 2021). He has served as President of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, and is currently a Trustee of the Science Museum Group. In 2025 he will give the MacLennan Lecture in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of King's College, Halifax, and the JBS Haldane Lecture of the Genetics Society.
More about Professor Gregory Radick