William Bateson

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This article is about the English geneticist. For his son the anthropologist and cyberneticist, see Gregory Bateson. For the British academic, see William Henry Bateson.

William Bateson
biological inheritance
AwardsRoyal Medal (1920)
Scientific career
Fieldsgenetics

William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. His 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics.

Early life and education

Dennis G. Lillie
, 1909

Bateson was born 1861 in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, the son of William Henry Bateson, Master of St John's College, Cambridge, and Anna Aikin, who was on the first governing body of Newnham College, Cambridge. He was educated at Rugby School and at St John's College, where he graduated BA in 1883 with a first in natural sciences.[2]

Taking up

Chesapeake Zoölogical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.[3]
Turning from morphology to study evolution and its methods, he returned to England and became a Fellow of St John's. Studying variation and heredity, he travelled in western Central Asia.[citation needed][4]

Career

Between 1900 and 1910 Bateson directed a rather informal "school" of genetics at Cambridge. His group consisted mostly of women associated with

Muriel Wheldale (later Onslow), carried out a series of breeding experiments in various plant and animal species between 1902 and 1910. The results both supported and extended Mendel's laws of heredity. Hilda Blanche Killby, who had finished her studies with the Newnham College Mendelians in 1901, aided Bateson in the replication of Mendel's crosses in peas. She conducted independent breeding experiments in rabbits and bantam fowl, as well.[7]

In 1910, Bateson became director of the

Cyril Dean Darlington.[9]

In 1919, he founded

learned societies dedicated to Genetics.[10]

Personal life

Bateson was married to Beatrice Durham. He first became engaged to her in 1889, but at the engagement party, was thought to have had too much wine, so his mother in law prevented her daughters' engagement.[5] They finally married 7 years later in June 1896,[5][11] by which time Arthur Durham had died and his wife had either died (according to Henig)[12] or had somehow been persuaded to drop her opposition to the marriage (according to Cock).[13] Their son was the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.

Bateson has been described as a "very militant" atheist.[14][15]

Awards

In June 1894 he was elected a

Croonian lecture
in 1920. He was the president of the British Association in 1913–1914.[17]

Work on biological variation (to 1900)

Bateson's work published before 1900 systematically studied the structural variation displayed by living organisms and the light this might shed on the mechanism of biological evolution,[18] and was strongly influenced by both Charles Darwin's approach to the collection of comprehensive examples, and Francis Galton's quantitative ("biometric") methods. In his first significant contribution,[19] he shows that some biological characteristics (such as the length of forceps in earwigs) are not distributed continuously, with a normal distribution, but discontinuously (or "dimorphically"). He saw the persistence of two forms in one population as a challenge to the then current conceptions of the mechanism of heredity, and says "The question may be asked, does the dimorphism of which cases have now been given represent the beginning of a division into two species?"

In his 1894 book, Materials for the study of variation,[20] Bateson took this survey of biological variation significantly further. He was concerned to show that biological variation exists both continuously, for some characters, and discontinuously for others, and coined the terms "meristic" and "substantive" for the two types. In common with Darwin, he felt that quantitative characters could not easily be "perfected" by the selective force of evolution, because of the perceived problem of the "swamping effect of intercrossing", but proposed that discontinuously varying characters could.

In Materials Bateson noted and named

homeotic mutations, in which an expected body-part has been replaced by another. The animal mutations he studied included bees with legs instead of antennae; crayfish with extra oviducts; and in humans, polydactyly, extra ribs, and males with extra nipples. These mutations are in the homeobox genes which control the pattern of body formation during early embryonic development of animals. The 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded for work on these genes. They are thought to be especially important to the basic development of all animals. These genes have a crucial function in many, and perhaps all, animals.[21]

In Materials unaware of Gregor Mendel's results, Bateson wrote concerning the mechanism of biological heredity, "The only way in which we may hope to get at the truth is by the organization of systematic experiments in breeding, a class of research that calls perhaps for more patience and more resources than any other form of biological enquiry. Sooner or later such an investigation will be undertaken and then we shall begin to know." Mendel had cultivated and tested some 28,000 plants, performing exactly the experiment Bateson wanted.[22][23][24]

Also in Materials, he stated what has been called Bateson's rule, namely that extra legs are mirror-symmetric with their neighbours, such as when an extra leg appears in an insect's leg socket. It appears to be caused by the leaking of positional signals across the limb-limb interface, so that the extra limb's polarity is reversed.[25]

In 1897 he reported some significant conceptual and methodological advances in his study of variation.[26] "I have argued that variations of a discontinuous nature may play a prepondering part in the constitution of a new species." He attempts to silence his critics (the "biometricians") who misconstrue his definition of discontinuity of variation by clarification of his terms: "a variation is discontinuous if, when all the individuals of a population are breeding freely together, there is not simple regression to one mean form, but a sensible preponderance of the variety over the intermediates… The essential feature of a discontinuous variation is therefore that, be the cause what it may, there is not complete blending between variety and type. The variety persists and is not "swamped by intercrossing". But critically, he begins to report a series of breeding experiments, conducted by Edith Saunders, using the alpine brassica Biscutella laevigata in the Cambridge botanic gardens. In the wild, hairy and smooth forms of otherwise identical plants are seen together. They intercrossed the forms experimentally, "When therefore the well-grown mongrel plants are examined, they present just the same appearance of discontinuity which the wild plants at the Tosa Falls do. This discontinuity is, therefore, the outward sign of the fact that in heredity the two characters of smoothness and hairiness do not completely blend, and the offspring do not regress to one mean form, but to two distinct forms."

At about this time, Hugo de Vries and Carl Erich Correns began similar plant-breeding experiments. But, unlike Bateson, they were familiar with the extensive plant breeding experiments of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, and they did not cite Bateson's work. Critically, Bateson gave a lecture to the Royal Horticultural Society in July 1899,[27] which was attended by Hugo de Vries, in which he described his investigations into discontinuous variation, his experimental crosses, and the significance of such studies for the understanding of heredity. He urged his colleagues to conduct large-scale, well-designed and statistically analysed experiments of the sort that, although he did not know it, Mendel had already conducted, and which would be "rediscovered" by de Vries and Correns just six months later.[24]

Founding the discipline of genetics

Further information: Mutationism

Bateson became famous as the outspoken

J.B.S. Haldane showed that discrete mutations were compatible with gradual evolution, helping to bring about the modern evolutionary synthesis
.

Bateson first suggested using the word "genetics" (from the

Edith Saunders also coined the word "allelomorph" ("other form"), which was later shortened to allele.[32]

Bateson co-discovered

Edith Saunders, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910. Bateson also coined the term "epistasis" to describe the genetic interaction of two independent loci. His interpretations and philosophies were often at odds with Galtonian eugenics, and he was a pivotal figure in shifting the consensus away from strict hereditarianism.[33]

The John Innes Centre holds a Bateson Lecture in his honour at the annual John Innes Symposium.[34]

Publications

Books & Book Contributions
  • Bateson, William (1894). Materials for the Study of Variation Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species. Macmillan.
  • Bateson, William (1902). Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence. C. J. Clay and Sons.
  • Bateson, William (1908). The Methods and Scope of Genetics. Cambridge University Press.
  • Bateson, William (1909). "Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights". In A.C. Seward (ed.). Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin and of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of "The Origin of Species". Cambridge University Press. pp. 85–101.
  • Bateson, William (1909). Mendel's Principles of Heredity. Cambridge University Press.
  • Bateson, William (1909). Summary of "Mendel's Principles". Harmsworth's World's Great Books.
  • Bateson, William (1912). Biological Fact and the Structure of Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Bateson, William (1913). Problems of Genetics. Yale University Press.
  • Bateson, William (1917). "The place of science in education". In A.C. Benson (ed.). Cambridge Essays on Education. Cambridge University Press.
  • Bateson, William; I. Pitman & Sons, Limited (1922). "Evolution and education". Ideals, Aims and Methods in Education. The New Educator's Library. Isaac Pitman Ltd.
  • Bateson, William (1928). Beatrice Bateson (ed.). Letters from the Steppe Written in the Years 1886-1887 by William Bateson. Cambridge University Press.
Journals and other media

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "William Bate son". Encyclopædia Britannica.
  2. ^ "Bateson, William (BT879)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  3. ^ Johns Hopkins University Circular Nov. (1883), vol III, no 27, pg 4.
  4. ^ Bateson, William (1928). Letters From the Steppe Written in the Years 1886-1887 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Library: Methuen.
  5. ^
    S2CID 84924910
    .
  6. ^ "Bateson Family Papers". American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 4 October 2013.
  7. S2CID 29790111
    .
  8. doi:10.1038/121027b0
    .
  9. ^ "A Brief History of the John Innes Centre". jic.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  10. ^ "Genetics Society Website > About > About the Society". genetics.org.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  11. ^ "Background note". Bateson Family Papers. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 30 July 2013.
  12. ISBN 9780618127412
    .
  13. ISBN 9780387756882
    .
  14. ISBN 9780791478271
    .
  15. ^ "William Bateson was a very militant atheist and a very bitter man, I fancy. Knowing that I was interested in biology, they invited me when I was still a school girl to go down and see the experimental garden. I remarked to him what I thought then, and still think, that doing research must be the most wonderful thing in the world and he snapped at me that it wasn't wonderful at all, it was tedious, disheartening, annoying and anyhow you didn't need an experimental garden to do research." Interview with Dr. Cecilia Gaposchkin Archived 3 May 2015 at the Wayback Machine by Owen Gingerich, 5 March 1968.
  16. ^ "Library and Archive Catalogue". Royal Society. Retrieved 11 December 2010.[permanent dead link]
  17. ^ "Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science". Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  18. ^ Scientific papers of William Bateson. RC Punnett (Ed) : Cambridge University Press 1928 Vol 1
  19. ^ Some cases of variation in secondary sexual characters statistically examined, Proc Zool Soc 1892
  20. ^ Materials for the study of variation, treated with especial regard to discontinuity in the origin of species William Bateson 1861–1926. London : Macmillan 1894 xv, 598 p
  21. ^ Genetic Science Learning Center. "Homeotic Genes and Body Patterns". Learn Genetics. University of Utah. Archived from the original on 15 March 2019. Retrieved 28 May 2019.
  22. ISBN 978-0-2039-1100-6
    .
  23. ISBN 978-0-07-024963-9
    .
  24. ^ a b Moore, Randy (2001). "The "Rediscovery" of Mendel's Work" (PDF). Bioscene. 27 (2): 13–24. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 February 2016.
  25. S2CID 204704335
    .
  26. ^ Progress in the study of variation I. Science Progress I, 1897
  27. ^ Bateson, W. (1900) "Hybridisation and Cross-Breeding as a Method of Scientific Investigation" J. RHS (1900) 24: 59 – 66, a report of a lecture given at the RHS Hybrid Conference in 1899. Full text:
  28. ^ Gillham, Nicholas W. (2001). Evolution by Jumps: Francis Galton and William Bateson and the Mechanism of Evolutionary Change. Genetics 159: 1383–1392.
  29. ^ "Naming 'genetics' | Lines of thought". exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2017.
  30. ^ Bateson W. (1906) "The progress of genetic research" Report of the Third International Conference 1906 on Genetics, W. Wilks, ed. London, England: Royal Horticultural Society. pp. 90–97. From p. 91: " … the science itself [i.e. the study of the breeding and hybridisation of plants] is still nameless, and we can only describe our pursuit by cumbrous and often misleading periphrasis. To meet this difficulty I suggest for the consideration of this Congress the term Genetics, which sufficiently indicates that our labors are devoted to the elucidation of the phenomena of heredity and variation: in other words, to the physiology of Descent, with implied bearing on the theoretical problems of the evolutionist and the systematist, and application to the practical problems of breeders, whether of animals or plants."
  31. ^ Gordon M. Shepherd (2010). "Mendel's proposal that heredity is the outcome of 'independent factors' led William Bateson in England in 1906 to suggest the term 'genetics' as a specific biological term for the study of the rules of heredity. Following Bateson, Wilhelm Johannsen in Denmark in 1909 proposed the term 'gene' for the 'independent factors', as well as 'genotype' for the combination of genes in an individual and 'phenotype'" (Creating modern neuroscience Archived 22 July 2015 at the Wayback Machine, p. 17).
  32. ^ Craft, Jude (2013). "Genes and genetics: the language of scientific discovery". Genes and genetics. Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  33. ^ Hardin, Garrett. Nature and Man's Fate, pp. 133, 197-199, Rinehart & Co., New York, Toronto (1959)
  34. ^ "The Bateson Lecture". John Innes Centre. Archived from the original on 9 November 2013. Retrieved 23 September 2013.

References

External links

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