HPSM

Greg Radick; "New Light on the Biometrician/Mendelian Debate from the Classroom (and Vice Versa)"

Abstract: The debate that broke out among biologists over Mendel's pea-hybrids paper after its rediscovery in 1900 -- the so-called "Biometrician/Mendelian Debate" -- has long been regarded as "done," thanks to the superb historical scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s.  But recent research with the unpublished papers of the leading anti-Mendelian biologist, W. F. R. Weldon, is opening up new perspectives on just what was at stake in the debate and why it went the way it did.  This research has also stimulated a novel teaching experiment, where students were taught introductory genetics with a curriculum reflecting Weldonian rather than Mendelian ways of structuring knowledge about inheritance.  In this seminar I'll examine the power of this experiment (and the improved version of the future) to illuminate a scientific debate from the past.  Going in the other direction, I'll also consider the power of past scientific debates, as understood from the inside by historians of science, to provide new resources for science teaching in the present.