¹ For a survey of the ‘Mendel and molecules’ debate, see Sterelny, Kim and Griffiths, Paul E., Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar, chs. 6 and 7.

² Olby, Robert, ‘Rosy Revised’, London Review of Books (20 March 2003), 15.Google Scholar

³ This analysis fleshes out the remarks on success, realism and inevitabilism in Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, ch. 3, esp. 68–70, 78–80.

⁴ Kroeber, Alfred, ‘The Superorganic’ (1917)Google Scholar, revised 1927 version, reprinted in Frontiers of Anthropology, Montagu, Ashley (ed.) (New York: Capricorn Books/G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), 344–81Google Scholar, quotation on 372–73. The text here reads ‘on clouds of earth’, which, given the sense of the passage, I take to be a mistake.

⁵ Fox Keller, Evelyn, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000Google Scholar). For ontological discussion in a similarly iconoclastic spirit, see John Dupre's chapter in this volume.

⁶ Op. cit. note 4, 369–75. On Kroeber's larger purposes in this influential paper, see Kardiner, Abram and Preble, Edward, They Studied Man (New York: Mentor, 1963), 169–72.Google Scholar

⁷ For Macaulay, and citations to other instances of the argument from multiple discovery to inevitability, see Merton, Robert K., ‘Singletons and Multiples in Science’ (1961)Google Scholar, reprinted in his The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Storer, N. W. (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), ch. 16, 353–4.Google Scholar

⁸ The best introduction to the debate is Conway Morris, Simon and Jay Gould, Stephen, ‘Showdown on the Burgess Shale’, Natural History 107 (December 1998—January 1999), 48–55Google Scholar. See also Gould, , Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 5; Morris, Conway, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 8, and Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

⁹ The revisionist scholarship on Mendel is summarized in Bowler, Peter J., The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 5. An excellent web resource on Mendel and Mendelism, including an annotated translation of the 1866 paper, is Mendel Web; see http://www.mendelweb.org (accessed July 2004).

¹⁰ On ‘rediscovery’ as an inadequate label for what happened to Mendel's work around 1900, see Olby, Robert, ‘Rediscovery as an Historical Concept’, New Trends in the History of Science, Visser, R. P. W.et al. (eds.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 197–208Google Scholar. See also the more detailed discussion in his Origins of Mendelism, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar, ch. 6. The personal dimension is nicely captured in Marantz Henig, Robin, The Monk in the Garden (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)Google Scholar, chs. 14 and 15.

¹¹ On whether Darwin and Wallace converged independently on natural selection, see Radick, Gregory, ‘Is the Theory of Natural Selection Independent of its History?’, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Hodge, Jonathan and Radick, Gregory (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 6, 149–50.Google Scholar

¹² On convergence and the eye, see Jay Gould, Stephen, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (London: Vintage, 1999), ch. 17, 331–2Google Scholar; cf. Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution, op. cit. note 8, 151–73, 193. On the large scope for disagreement about claims for convergence in biology, see Adrian Woolfson's review of the latter, ‘How to Make a Mermaid’, London Review of Books (5 February 2004), 25–6.

¹³ For Lysenko in his own words, and in English, the indispensable volume is Lysenko, T. D., Agrobiology: Essays on Problems of Genetics, Plant Breeding and Seed Growing (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954)Google Scholar. The quotation is from ‘Two Trends in Genetics’ (1936–7), 160–94, 186. The whine of axes grinding is never far off in the historiography of Lysenkoism. For a non-Marxist perspective, see Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. For a Marxist but not uncritical perspective, see Levins, Richard and Lewontin, Richard, ‘The Problem of Lysenkoism’ (1976)Google Scholar, in their The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, ch. 7.

¹⁴ The quotation is in Lysenko, T. D., ‘The Situation in Biological Science’ (1948), in his Agrobiology, op. cit. note 13, 515–54Google Scholar, 552. For the cartoons, illustrating a 1949 article entitled ‘Fly-Lovers and Man-Haters’, see Soyfer, Valery N., Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, Gruliow, L. and R. (trans.) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, illustration insert, no. 19.

¹⁵ Graham, Loren R., What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience! (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17–31Google Scholar, quotation on 31.

¹⁶ Graham, op. cit. note 15, quotation on 25.

¹⁷ See Levins and Lewontin, op. cit. note 13, esp. 171–4, 188–191, and Berlan, Jean-Pierre and Lewontin, R. C., ‘The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn’, Monthly Review 38 (July-August 1986), 35–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ An excellent study of Galton in the round is Wright Gillham, Nicholas, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Like Mendel, Galton is well served on the web; an especially generous selection of Galtoniana is available at http://www.mugu.com/galton/ (accessed July 2004).

¹⁹ Galton, Francis, Natural Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1889)Google Scholar. On this book and its role in fostering biometry, see Gillham, op. cit. note 18, chs. 18 and 19.

²⁰ Weldon, W. F. R., ‘On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 54 (1893), 318–29Google Scholar. On this paper, and Pearson's contribution to it, see Gillham, op. cit. note 18, 281–3, and Gayon, Jean, Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection, Cobb, M. (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204–10.Google Scholar

²¹ Galton, Francis, ‘The Average Contribution of Each Several Ancestor to the Total Heritage of the Offspring’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 61 (1897), 401–13Google Scholar, and ‘A Diagram of Heredity’, Nature 57 (1898), 293Google Scholar. On the law as Galton conceived it, see the superb discussion in Gayon, op. cit. note 20, 132–46.

²² [Weldon, W. F. R.], ‘Current Theories of the Hereditary Process’ (eighth lecture), The Lancet (25 03 1905), 810.Google Scholar

²³ Pearson reviewed the changes in Pearson, Karl, ‘A Mendelian's View of the Law of Ancestral Inheritance’, Biometrika 3 (1904), 109–12Google Scholar. On Pearson's interpretations of Galton's law, see Bulmer, Michael, ‘Galton's Theory of Ancestral Inheritance’, A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics, Keynes, M., Edwards, A. W. F. and Peel, R. (eds.) (London: Galton Institute/CRC Press, 2004), 13–18Google Scholar, esp. 15–16, and, more extensively, Norton, Bernard J., Karl Pearson and the Galtonian Tradition: Studies in the Rise of Quantitative Social Biology (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCL, 1979)Google Scholar, ch. 6.

²⁴ Pearson was of course the author of that influential positivist breviary, The Grammar of Science (London: Scott, 1892)Google Scholar. In Galton's 1897 paper introducing the law, he had argued that ‘its close agreement with physiological phenomena' —in particular, the halving of the germinal material in the production of gametes—‘ought to give a prejudice in favour of its truth.’ Galton, op. cit. note 21, 403, emphasis in original. For Pearson, however, the law, as he wrote in 1903, ‘is not a biological hypothesis at all, it is simply the statement of a fundamental theorem in the statistical theory of multiple correlation applied to a particular type of statistics.’ Pearson, Karl, ‘The Law of Ancestral Heredity’, Biometrika 2 (1903), 211–29Google Scholar, quotation on 226.

²⁵ The abstracts of Weldon's lectures on ‘Current Theories of the Hereditary Process’ appeared in The Lancet (1905), 42Google ScholarPubMed, 180, 307–8, 512, 584–5, 657, 732, 810. The quotation is from 42.

²⁶ Weldon's ‘Theory of Inheritance’ and other unpublished writings are contained in the Pearson Papers, 264/2, UCL. For discussion of these and other sources, see Olby, Robert, ‘The Dimensions of Scientific Controversy: The Biometric-Mendelian Debate’, British Journal for the History of Science 22 (1988), 299–320Google Scholar, esp. 314–7. See also Norton, op. cit. note 23, 190–3, 218–20. The fullest treatment of Weldon's life and thought remains Pearson's long obituary notice, in Biometrika 5 (1906), 1–52Google Scholar. For Pearson's reconstruction of Weldon's theory, see Pearson, Karl, ‘On a Mathematical Theory of Determinantal Inheritance, from Suggestions and Notes of the Late W. F. R. Weldon’, Biometrika 6 (1908), 80–93.Google Scholar

²⁷ The historiography of this debate up to the mid-1980s is summarized in Olby, op. cit. note 26, 300–4. Notable contributions since then include Gayon, op. cit. note 20, ch. 8, and Magnello, Eileen, ‘The Reception of Mendelism by the Biometricians and the Early Mendelians (1899–1909)’, in A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics, op. cit. note 23, 19–32Google Scholar, which makes use of some of Weldon's unpublished letters.

²⁸ Bateson presented gametic purity as the ‘essence’ of Mendelism in his polemical Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), quotation on 115. On ‘the Mendelian doctrine of gametic purity’ as irreconcilable ‘with the vast body of facts and data of heredity in human families and races collected and published by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson’, see [Weldon], ‘Current Theories of the Hereditary Process’, op. cit. note 25, 732. Weldon took care to attribute the doctrine to the Mendelians, not to Mendel; see Weldon, W. F. R., ‘Mr Bateson's Revisions of Mendel's Theory of Heredity’, Biometrika 2 (1903), 286–98;CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 288–9.

²⁹ For Weldon's derivation of the Mendelian ratio without the assumption of gametic purity, see Norton, op. cit. note 23, 190–3, which presents in more accessible form part of the discussion in Pearson, ‘On a Mathematical Theory of Determinantal Inheritance’, op. cit. note 26. As Pearson summarized (93): ‘We see that Mendelian dominance and the Mendelian quarter may arise in cases where there is no pure gamete, and that the discovery of a latent character may need several generations of breeding.

³⁰ Weldon, W. F. R., ‘Mendel's Laws of Alternative Inheritance in Peas’, Biometrika 1 (1902), 228–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 252.

³¹ Weldon, op. cit. note 30, 242.

³² The subsumption of the ancestral law under Mendelism culminated in Ronald Fisher's famous paper, ‘The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 52 (1918), 399–433Google Scholar. For discussion, see Norton, op. cit. note 23, 220.

³³ Hartl, Daniel L. and Jones, Elizabeth W., Genetics: Principles and Analysis, fourth edition (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1998).Google Scholar

³⁴ As Olby has put it, within zoology, ‘Weldon enjoyed insider status and Bateson outsider status.’ Olby, op. cit. note 26, 313, emphasis in original.

³⁵ On Bateson and chromosomes, see Coleman, William, ‘Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative Thought in Science’, Centaurus 15 (1970), 228–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Weldon and chromosomes, see [Weldon], op. cit. note 25, 584–5, 810, and Pearson's remarks in Pearson, ‘On a Mathematical Theory of Determinantal Inheritance’, op. cit. note 26, 81–82. On Weldon and Bateson's divergent attitudes towards Darwinism and other topics, see Olby, op. cit. note 26.

³⁶ This section owes much to provocative questions from Jeff Ketland, then at Leeds, and from Richard Gray at TCD.

³⁷ On incommensurability in this sense, see Hacking, Ian, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences’, Science as Practice and Culture, Pickering, Andrew (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29–64Google Scholar, see 56–7.

³⁸ See Kohler, Robert E., Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 2 and 3. For discussion, see Radick, Gregory, ‘Cultures of Evolutionary Biology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (2003), 187–200Google Scholar, 197–8. Little in Kohler's analysis would have been news to the Lysenkoists; see Levins and Lewontin, op. cit. note 13, 181.

³⁹ Weldon, op. cit. note 30, 244.

⁴⁰ Weldon, op. cit. note 30, 245. The plate can be found facing 254.

⁴¹ For Weldon's remarks on Mendel's ‘yellow’ and ‘green’, see Weldon, W. F. R., ‘On the Ambiguity of Mendel's Categories’, Biometrika 2 (1902), 44–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Weldon was the first person to point out that Mendel's published data fit his theories improbably well. See Weldon, op. cit. note 30, 233–5; and for discussion, see Magnello, op. cit. note 27, 22–3.

⁴² While it is true, as the sociologist of science Barry Barnes has noted, that ‘the biometry-Mendelism controversy’ is ‘itself a slightly problematic historical construct, with many scientists claiming both affiliations’, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that there was no real intellectual conflict between biometry and Mendelism. All combinings of the biometrical and Mendelian perspectives called for choices, changes and/or partitionings of domain. See Barry Barnes, review of Man Kim's, KyungExplaining Scientific Consensus: The Case of Mendelian Genetics (1994)Google Scholar, in Isis 87 (1996), 198–9, quotation on 198.

⁴³ ‘Probably both views, the Galtonian and the Mendelian, will be reconciled in time in a wider generalisation of the facts of inheritance and descent—a larger theory of heredity’, was how Weldon put it near the start of his seventh London lecture on inheritance. However, he devoted the rest of the lecture, and the final lecture too, to the problems plaguing Mendelism. [Weldon], op. cit. note 25, 732, 810, quotation on 732. In his unpublished book manuscript, Weldon expanded: ‘Mendel's work and Galton's are … in a sense complementary, the one dealing with the case in which selective mating is carried to its extreme limit among the ancestors of the stock observed, while the parents belong to distinct races, the other dealing with the stock produced by parents of a single race, in which selective mating is reduced to a minimum.’ Quoted in Olby, op. cit. note 26, 316.

⁴⁴ See Olby, Robert, ‘William Bateson's Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment’, British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987), 399–420CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, esp. 412–5.

⁴⁵ For another reading of the controversy by Kuhnian lights, see MacKenzie, Donald and Barnes, Barry, ‘Scientific Judgment: The Biometry-Mendelism Controversy’, in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, Barnes, B. and Shapin, S. (eds.) (Sage: London, 1979), 191–210Google Scholar, esp. 198–203. MacKenzie and Barnes also concluded that this was not an instance of paradigms clashing. For paradigms as exemplars, see Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 187–91, 198–204.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Gayon, op. cit. note 20, 310.

⁴⁷ An exceptionally interesting and complex figure in this story is the Harvard geneticist William Castle. In the early days of Mendelism, he counted himself a Mendelian who doubted that gametes were pure. He was also uncomfortable with the mutationism then current among his fellow Mendelians. If Castle had not been rude about the ancestral law, the ancestrians might well have seen him as one of their own, though operating in a niche—selection experiments—that they regarded as marginal. Eventually Mendelian critics persuaded Castle that experimental results apparently showing gametic impurity could be explained if one postulated the existence in pure gametes of modifier genes. See Gayon, op. cit. note 20, 310–314, and, for Castle's hooded-rat experiments as a case study in scientific realism about entities, see Vicedo, Marga, ‘Experimentation in Early Genetics: The Implications of the Historical Character of Science for Scientific Realism’, Biology andEpistemology, Creath, Richard and Maienschein, Jane (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215–43Google Scholar. For Castle on the ancestral law, see Pearson, op. cit. note 23 (the ‘Mendelian’ of Pearson's title is Castle). I am grateful to Steve French and Jon Hodge at Leeds for helpful discussion of Castle.

⁴⁸ See Levins and Lewontin, op. cit. note 13, 178–9.

⁴⁹ On methods and motives for engaging the counterfactual history of science, see Radick, Gregory, ‘The Scientific Pasts that Might Have Been, and Why They Matter’, New Scientist (in press)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ A related worry is that every failed but potentially successful theory can be described as a variant—more and less extreme—of a successful theory. The upshot would be that, no matter what had happened in the science of heredity, there would be grounds for declaring the winning theory ‘Mendelism’.

⁵¹ Lipton, Peter, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2004), 206Google Scholar.

⁵² On the transgenic silky goats, see Osborne, Lawrence, ‘Got Silk’, The Best American Science Writing 2003, Sacks, Oliver (ed.) (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 186–93Google Scholar.