UGI Seminar: Gregory Radick: Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology

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death in 1906 at the age of 46 left the book setting out his alternative perspective on inheritance unfinished and unpublished.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.