Disputed Inheritance: Why the Post-1900 Battle over Mendel Matters

Abstract: According to the philosopher of biology John Beatty, history matters when a particular future can be shown to depend on a past that wasn't bound to happen, but did.  In my recent book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology, I argue that history matters in this sense for genetics, in that the widely taken-for-granted Mendelization of inheritance in the early twentieth century -- a change which put a deterministic gene concept at the center of biological thinking and doing -- wasn't inevitable, but was the upshot of events that could well have turned out differently.  In this talk I'll summarize the case for the view that, had nascent Mendelism's most formidable critic, the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon, not succumbed to pneumonia in the spring of 1906 at the age of forty-six, but instead had lived long enough to publish a nearly-completed book setting out his alternative framing for the science of inheritance,  nowadays what we would take for granted is that DNA can be variable in its effects depending on contexts, internal and external, so phenotypic plasticity should be regarded not as an exception but as the rule.