C. H. Waddington

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Conrad Hal Waddington

Mendel Medal (1960)
Scientific career
FieldsDevelopmental biology, genetics, paleontology
InstitutionsUniversity of Edinburgh
University of Cambridge, Christ's College
Wesleyan University
Centre for Human Ecology
Doctoral studentsRobert Edwards

Conrad Hal Waddington

philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology
.

Although his theory of

Lamarckian
inheritance, the acquisition of inherited characteristics through the effects of the environment during an organism's lifetime.

Waddington had wide interests that included poetry and painting, as well as left-wing political leanings. In his book The Scientific Attitude (1941), he touched on political topics such as central planning, and praised Marxism as a "profound scientific philosophy".

Life

Conrad Waddington, known as "Wad" to his friends and "Con" to family, was born in Evesham to Hal and Mary Ellen (Warner) Waddington, on 8 November 1905.

His family moved to India and until nearly three years of age, Waddington lived in India, where his father worked on a tea estate in the

holistic systems. Waddington reflected that this early education prepared him for Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy in the 1920s and 30s and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and others in the 1940s.[2]

He attended

palaeontology but moved on to the heredity
and development of living things. He also studied philosophy.

During

operational research with the Royal Air Force and became scientific advisor to the Commander in Chief of Coastal Command
from 1944 to 1945.

After the war, in 1947, he replaced Francis Albert Eley Crew as Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.[7] He would stay at Edinburgh for the rest of life with the exception of one year (1960–1961) when he was a Fellow on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.[8] His personal papers are largely kept at the University of Edinburgh library.

He died in Edinburgh on 26 September 1975.

Family

Waddington was married twice. His first marriage produced a son, C. Jake Waddington, professor of physics at the

Margaret Justin Blanco White, daughter of the writer Amber Reeves, with whom he had two daughters, the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey (1943–) and mathematician Dusa McDuff (1945–).[9][10]

Evolution

In the early 1930s, Waddington and many other embryologists looked for the molecules that would induce the amphibian neural tube. The search was beyond the technology of that time, and most embryologists moved away from such deep problems. Waddington, however, came to the view that the answers to embryology lay in genetics, and in 1935 went to Thomas Hunt Morgan's Drosophila laboratory in California, even though this was a time when most embryologists felt that genes were unimportant and just played a role in minor phenomena such as eye colour.

In the late 1930s, Waddington produced formal models about how gene regulatory products could generate developmental phenomena, showed how the mechanisms underpinning Drosophila development could be studied through a systematic analysis of mutations that affected the development of the Drosophila wing.[a] In a period of great creativity at the end of the 1930s, he also discovered mutations that affected cell phenotypes and wrote his first textbook of "developmental epigenetics", a term that then meant the external manifestation of genetic activity.

Waddington introduced the concept of canalisation, the ability of an organism to produce the same phenotype despite variation in genotype or environment. He also identified a mechanism called genetic assimilation which would allow an animal's response to an environmental stress to become a fixed part of its developmental repertoire, and then went on to show that the mechanism would work.

In 1972, Waddington founded the Centre for Human Ecology in the University of Edinburgh.[13]

Epigenetic landscape

Waddington's

chreode to represent this cellular developmental process. The idea was based on experiment: Waddington found that one effect of mutation (which could modulate the epigenetic landscape) was to affect how cells differentiated. He also showed how mutation could affect the landscape, and used this metaphor in his discussions on evolution—he emphasised (like Ernst Haeckel
before him) that evolution mainly occurred through mutations that affected developmental anatomy.

Genetic assimilation

Darwinian evolution, and the Baldwin effect
. All the theories offer explanations of how organisms respond to a changed environment with adaptive inherited change.
Main article: Genetic assimilation

Waddington proposed an evolutionary process, "

Darwinian mechanism that allows certain acquired characteristic to become heritable. According to Navis, (2007) "Waddington focused his genetic assimilation work on the crossveinless trait of Drosophila. This trait occurs with high frequency in heat-treated flies. After a few generations, the trait can be found in the population, without the application of heat, based on hidden genetic variation that Waddington asserted had been "assimilated".[16][17]

Neo-Darwinism versus Lamarckism

Waddington's theory of genetic assimilation was controversial. The

Lamarckian inheritance. They denied that genetic assimilation had taken place, and asserted that Waddington had simply observed the natural selection of genetic variants that already existed in the study population.[18] Other biologists such as Wallace Arthur disagree, writing that "genetic assimilation, looks, but is not Lamarckian. It is a special case of the evolution of phenotypic plasticity".[19] Adam S. Wilkins wrote that "[Waddington] in his lifetime... was widely perceived primarily as a critic of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. His criticisms ... were focused on what he saw as unrealistic, 'atomistic' models of both gene selection and trait evolution." In particular, according to Wilkins, Waddington felt that the Neo-Darwinians badly neglected the phenomenon of extensive gene interactions and that the "randomness" of mutational effects, posited in the theory, was false.[20] Even though Waddington became critical of the neo-darwinian synthetic theory of evolution, he still described himself as a Darwinian, and called for an extended evolutionary synthesis based on his research.[20][21] Reviewing the debate in 2015, the systems biologist Denis Noble
writes however that

[Waddington] did not describe himself as a Lamarckian, but by revealing mechanisms of inheritance of acquired characteristics, I think he should be regarded as such. The reason he did not do so is that Lamarck could not have conceived of the processes that Waddington revealed. Incidentally, it is also true to say that Lamarck did not invent the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But, whether historically correct or not, we are stuck today with the term 'Lamarckian' for inheritance of a characteristic acquired through an environmental influence.[22]

As an organiser

Waddington was very active in advancing biology as a discipline. He contributed to a book on the role of the sciences in times of war, and helped set up several professional bodies representing biology as a discipline.[23]

A remarkable number of his contemporary colleagues in Edinburgh became Fellows of the Royal Society during his time there, or shortly thereafter.[24] Waddington was an old-fashioned intellectual who lived in both the arts and science milieus of the 1950s and wrote widely. His 1969 book Behind Appearance; a Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in This Century (MIT press) not only has wonderful pictures but is still worth reading.[25] Waddington was, without doubt, the most original and important thinker about developmental biology of the pre-molecular age and the medal of the British Society for Developmental Biology is named after him.[26]

Waddington co-founded The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 1969 with Professor John MacQueen, Professor of Scottish Literature and Oral Tradition.[27]

  • Pages from a photograph album, given to Waddington by his colleagues on his 50th birthday.
    Pages from a photograph album, given to Waddington by his colleagues on his 50th birthday.

Selected works

Books

  • Waddington, C. H. (1939). An Introduction to Modern Genetics. London : George Alien & Unwin.
  • ––– (1940). Organisers & Genes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • ––– and others (1942). Science and Ethics, George Allen & Unwin.
  • ––– (1946). How Animals Develop. London : George Allen & Unwin.
  • ––– (1948). The Scientific Attitude, Pelican Books
  • ––– (1953). The Epigenetics of birds. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
  • ––– (1956). Principles of Embryology. London : George Allen & Unwin.
  • ––– (1957). The Strategy of the Genes. London : George Allen & Unwin.
  • ––– (1959). Biological Organisation Cellular and Subcellular : Proceedings of a Symposium. London: Pergamon Press.
  • ––– (1960). The Ethical Animal. London : George Allen & Unwin.
  • ––– (1961). The Human Evolutionary System. In: Michael Banton (Ed.), Darwinism and the Study of Society. London: Tavistock.
  • ––– (1961). The Nature of Life. London : George, Allen, & Unwin.
  • ––– (1962). New Patterns in Genetics and Development. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • ––– (1966). Principles of Development and Differentiation. New York: Macmillan Company.
  • ––– (1970). 72). Behind Appearance : A Study in the Relationship Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century. The MIT Press.
  • –––, ed. (1968–72). Towards a Theoretical Biology. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • –––,
    Longuet-Higgins, H.C., Lucas, J.R. (1972). The Nature of Mind, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1971-3 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, online
    )
  • –––, Kenny, A., Longuet-Higgins, H. C., Lucas, J. R. (1973). The Development of Mind, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1971-3 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, online)
  • ––– (1973) O.R. in World War 2: Operational Research Against the U-Boat. London: Elek Science.
  • –––, & Jantsch, E. (Eds.). (1976). (published posthumously). Evolution and Consciousness: Human Systems in Transition. Addison-Wesley.
  • ––– (1977) (published posthumously). Tools for Thought. London: Jonathan Cape.

Papers

  • Waddington, C. H. (1942). Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters. Nature 150 (3811):563–565.
  • --- (1946). Human Ideals and Human Progress. World Review August:29-36.
  • ––– & Carter T. C. (1952). Malformations in mouse embryos induced by trypan blue. Nature 169 (4288):27-28.
  • ––– (1952). Selection of the Genetic Basis for an Acquired Character. Nature 169 (4294):278.
  • ––– (1953). Genetic assimilation of an acquired character. Evolution 7:118–126.
  • ––– (1953). Epigenetics and evolution. Symposia of the Society of Experimental Biology 7:186–199.
  • ––– (1956). Genetic assimilation of the bithorax phenotype. Evolution 10:1–13.
  • ––– (1961). Genetic assimilation. Advances in Genetics 10:257–290.
  • ––– (1974). A Catastrophe Theory of Evolution. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 231:32–42.
  • ––– (1977).(published posthumously). Whitehead and Modern Science. Mind in Nature: The Interface of Science and Philosophy. Ed. John B. Cobb and David R. Griffin. University Press of America.

Notes

  1. ^ This was the essence of the approach that won the 1995 Nobel prize in medicine for Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus[11][12]

References

  1. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1977.0022
  2. ^ Waddington, C. H. 1975. The Evolution of an Evolutionist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pg. 2.
  3. ^ Robertson, Alan. 1977. "Conrad Hal Waddington. 8 November 1905 – 26 September 1975." Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23, 575-622. Pg 577.
  4. ^ Supplement, Historical Register of the University of Cambridge, 1921-30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932, p. 63.
  5. ^ Robertson, Alan. 1977. "Conrad Hal Waddington. 8 November 1905 – 26 September 1975." Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23, 575-622. Pp. 579-580.
  6. ^ Yoxen, Edward. 1986. "Form and Strategy in Biology: Reflections on the Career of C. H. Waddington." In A History of Embryology, edited by T. J Horder, J. A Witkowski, and C. C Wylie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 310-11.
  7. ^ "Good Fellowship - The Repository - Royal Society". blogs.royalsociety.org. Retrieved 23 April 2018.
  8. ^ "Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records, 1958 - 1969". Wesleyan.edu. Archived from the original on 14 March 2017. Retrieved 4 April 2010.
  9. doi:10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.112261
    . Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  10. ^ Robertson, Alan. 1977. Conrad Hal Waddington. 8 November 1905 – 26 September 1975. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23, 575-622. P. 578
  11. S2CID 32648995
    .
  12. ^ "Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: Collaborating to Find Developmental Genes". iBiology. Archived from the original on 13 October 2016. Retrieved 13 October 2016.
  13. ^ "Conrad Waddington". Centre for Human Ecology. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
  14. ^ Goldberg, A. D., Allis, C. D., & Bernstein, E. (2007). Epigenetics: A landscape takes shape. Cell, 128, 635-638.
  15. ^ Allen, Matthew. 2015. "Compelled by the Diagram: Thinking through C. H. Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape." Contemporaneity 4.
  16. ISSN 1940-5030
    .
  17. ISBN 9780822944669
    .
  18. ISBN 978-1-4615-6823-0
    .
  19. ISBN 978-1405186582
    .
  20. ^
    S2CID 84217300
    .
  21. S2CID 19632484
    .
  22. PMID 25788723
    .
  23. PMID 14760651
    .
  24. PMID 11615737
    .
  25. ISSN 0036-8075
    .
  26. ^ "The Waddington Medal". British Society for Developmental Biology. 2015. Retrieved 7 October 2019.
  27. ^ "IASH at 50". University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 4 March 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2020.

External links

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