Everything about William Bateson totally explained
William Bateson (
August 8,
1861 –
February 8,
1926) was a
British geneticist. He was the first person to use the term
genetics to describe the study of
heredity and
biological inheritance, and the chief populariser of the ideas of
Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by
Hugo de Vries and
Carl Correns.
Career
In 1894 Bateson published
Materials for the study of variation: treated with special regard to discontinuity in the origin of species, in which he catalogued unusual physical variations in animal specimens, and classified each variation as either a deviation from the expected number of a certain body part; or as one in which an expected body part has been replaced by another (which he called
homeotic). The animal variations he studied included bees with legs instead of antennae;
crayfish with extra
oviducts; and in humans,
polydactyly, extra
ribs, and males with extra
nipples.
Bateson became famous as the outspoken
Mendelian antagonist of
Walter Raphael Weldon, his former teacher, and
Karl Pearson who led the
biometric school of thinking. This concerned the debate over
saltationism versus
gradualism (Darwin had been a gradualist, but Bateson was a saltationist). Later,
Ronald Fisher and
J.B.S. Haldane showed that discrete mutations were compatible with gradual evolution: see the
modern evolutionary synthesis.
Bateson was the first to suggest the word "genetics" (from the
Greek genno,
γεννώ;
to give birth) to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation in a personal letter to Alan Sedgwick, dated
April 18,
1905. Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in
London in
1906. Although this was three years before
Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "
gene" to describe the units of hereditary information, De Vries had introduced the word "pangene" for the same concept already in 1889 and etymologically the word genetics finds its origin in Darwin's concept of
pangenesis.
Bateson co-discovered
genetic linkage with
Reginald Punnett, and he and Punnett founded the
Journal of Genetics in
1910.
In his later years he was a friend and confidant of the German
Erwin Baur. Their correspondence includes their discussion of
eugenics.
His son was the anthropologist and cyberneticist
Gregory Bateson.
Further Information
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