Charles H. Pence (Université catholique de Louvain)

 

 

The “classic” story of the history of genetics often focuses on the conceptual and theoretical work

via which central figures like R. A. Fisher, T. H. Morgan, and Sewall Wright constructed a picture

of the gene that was amenable to statistical analysis. Of course, this story has been revisited and

sophisticated in a variety of ways over the years. One major aspect of this shift involves rethinking

the role and motivations of the architects of the Modern Synthesis. Another has highlighted the

further efforts toward novel theories of inheritance by earlier figures like Arthur Darbishire and

Udny Yule, though often still limited to interpreting their work as involving “synthesizing biometry

and Mendelism.”

In this talk, I hope to lay out another set of philosophical commitments that grounded a number of

efforts toward what has traditionally been called “synthesis,” which can be found in the work of a

number of figures between 1905 and 1920. For reasons of time, I will focus on W. F. R. Weldon

(though others like Yule, Goodrich, and Lock exemplify the same phenomenon). Rather than an

overt effort to “combine the insights” of biometry and Mendelism – an effort that, I claim, is at best

a secondary presence in his work, and often inconsistent with his understanding of his own project –

what we see instead is a concerted attempt to find the physico-chemical grounding for a process of

heredity that was still thought to be genuinely Galtonian in character. Put differently, how could any

process that respected Galton’s insights concerning ancestry be made consistent with the

cytological, or as we might now call them, biochemical details of inheritance as they were

increasingly coming to be understood around 1900? Reinterpreted in this way, I argue, the work of

these figures is not only more consistent, but more insightful, and their responses to criticisms and

engagements with their communities become easier to understand.