Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is an eliminable source of support for determinism. Undergraduate students who attended a standard 'Mendelian approach' university course in introductory genetics on average showed no change in their determinist views about genes. By contrast, students who attended an alternative course which, inspired by the work of a critic of early Mendelism, W. F. R. Weldon (1860Weldon ( -1906, replaced an emphasis on Mendel's peas with an emphasis on developmental contexts and their role in bringing about phenotypic variability, were less determinist about genes by the end of teaching. Improvements in both the new Weldonian curriculum and the study design are in view for the future.

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Worries about fraudulent data should give way to broader critiques of Mendel's legacy

When philosophers look to the history of biology, they most often ask about what happened, and how best to describe it. They ask, for instance, whether molecular genetics subsumed the Mendelian genetics preceding it, or whether these two sciences have main–tained rather messier relations. Here I wish to pose a question as much about what did not happen as what did. My concern is with the strength of the links between our biological science—our biology—and the particular history which brought that science into being. Would quite different histories have produced roughly the same science? Or, on the contrary, would different histories have produced other, quite different biologies?

Abstract:A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916Hockett ( -2000. In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and-famously with Chomsky-the place of political discipline within a scientific life. W H Y A N T I B E H AV I O R I S M ? W H Y C H O M S K Y ' S ?Anyone inclined to organize the history of science around "revolutions" has long had to hand a tidy scheme for dividing up American psychology in the twentieth century. Before World War II there was the behaviorist revolution. After the war there was the cognitive revolution. Where the former banished the mind from the domain of psychological knowledge, the latter brought it back in. Each revolution's beginnings, moreover, have an emblem in a brilliant, boldly controversial call to arms: on the one side, John Watson's 1913 manifesto "Psychology as School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom; g.m.radick @leeds.ac.uk. This paper has benefited enormously from discussions at seminars and meetings in Leeds, Lancaster, Vancouver, Berlin, and Edinburgh and from the improving attention of a small army of learned readers and listeners, including Jonathan Hodge, Paul Strand, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Tammy Goss, John Joseph, Tania Munz, Randy Harris, Michael Gordin, Geoffrey Pullum, Steven Pinker, Ageliki Lefkaditou, Floris Cohen, and the Isis referees. It is a pleasure to thank them all for their muchappreciated generosities.Isis, volume 107, number 1.