William Bateson
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.
Bateson was born in
Whitby, educated at
Rugby School and
St John's College,
Cambridge. He popularised the work of
Gregor Mendel in the
English-speaking world. Bateson became involved in a bitter dispute with the
biometricians led by his former teacher
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon and by
Karl Pearson. The biometricians doubted the generality of Mendel's account of heredity and also believed that
evolution proceeded continuously rather than by jumps. These differences were resolved with the
modern evolutionary synthesis (see Provine).
Bateson authored the 1894 treatise
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as either a deviation from the expected number of a certain body part; or as one in which an expected body part has been replaced by another (which he called
homeosis). 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.
William 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
Adam Sedgwick, dated
April 18,
1905. Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Genetics in London in 1906, three years before
Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "
gene" to describe the units of hereditary information. Thus the phenomenon of
phenotype was investigated earlier than
genes were discovered.
Bateson co-discovered
genetic linkage with
Reginald Punnett, and he and Punnett founded the
Journal of Genetics in 1910.
His son was the anthropologist
Gregory Bateson.
*
W. B. Provine (1971).
The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. University of Chicago Press.
* William Bateson (1894).
Materials for the study of variation: treated with special regard to discontinuity in the origin of species.
Available online.*
BBC site*
Punnett and Bateson* Several documents by, or about, Bateson are on Donald Forsdyke's webpages, e.g.
Opposition to Bateson
