Beyond Mendelism and Biometry

Abstract

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The Historiography of Scientific Revolutions: A Philosophical Reflection

“…It is widely received that Mendelian genetics is the first consensus in the history of modern genetics (e.g. Darden, 1991;Shan, 2021;Waters, 2004), but it is not easy to identify the essential elements of Mendelian genetics. As Darden (1991) and Shan (2020a) have shown, there were so many radical theoretical and non-theoretical developments that very few was invariantly shared from Mendel's theory of hybrid development ( 1866) to Morgan's theory of the gene (1926).…”

Theory Choice as Niche Construction: The Feedback Loop between Scientific Theories and Epistemic Values

“…Since the nature of the opposition between biometricians and Mendelians has been extensively debated (Kim 1994;Mackenzie 1981;Roll-Hansen 1980), and the adequacy of this dichotomy as a historical framework has recently been questioned (e.g., Ankeny 2000;Vicedo 1995;Pence 2011;Stoltzfus and Cable 2014;Shan 2021), a few clarifications on our analytic perspective are in order. First, we follow Morrison (2002) in her characterization of the main divergences between the biometrical and the Mendelian approaches as being methodological in character.…”

“…In fact, the diversity of theoretical and methodological commitments held by the scientists involved in these controversies prevents the identification of a consensus converging into two Kuhn-like competing paradigms, a biometrical and a Mendelian, understood as disciplinary matrices (Müller-Wille 2021). Therefore, the historical stretch that we consider is best characterized in terms of a pre-paradigmatic period of genetics, rather than an episode building up to a scientific revolution (Shan 2021). For these reasons, we limit our focus to the specific disagreement between continuous and discontinuous evolution (and not to the whole biometrician-Mendelian controversy).…”

Methods for interpreting an untested Darwinian conjecture

“…Exceptions included the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who held that "Natura non saltum facit" (or: Nature does not make a jump); that 'nature' changes through gradual increments (Britton et al, 2008), few scientists recognized the evolutionary importance of the small deviations that Darwin had discussed in The Origin. It was not until the biometrical school (Galton, 1889;Pearson, 1898Pearson, , 1902 established that continuous variation was inherited according to Mendel's laws of heredity (Bateson, 1902) that intraspecific variation was accepted as central to evolutionary change (reviewed by Shan, 2021). Thus, Darwin's insight into the importance of intraspecific variation should itself be seen as revolutionary.…”