Gregory Radick

Putting Mendel in His Place: How Curriculum Reform in Genetics and Counterfactual History of Science Can Work Together

Textbook presentations of genetics have changed remarkably little since their earliest days. Typically an initial chapter introduces Mendel’s pea-hybridization experiments and the lessons (‘laws’) drawn from them. Then, in succeeding chapters, those lessons are gradually qualified and supplemented out of existence. The case of dominance is an especially well-discussed example of a concept that has survived in genetics pedagogy despite its diminishing role in genetic theory and practice. To clarify the costs of continuing to organize knowledge of heredity in traditionally Mendelian ways, this chapter recalls criticisms of Mendelism that were made at its start but have since been lost. The criticisms came from the Oxford zoologist W. F. R. Weldon (1860–1906). Although remembered now as a ‘biometrician’, Weldon was by training an embryologist, who toward the end of his life drew upon the latest experimental studies of animal development in order to suggest an alternative and, in his view, superior concept of dominance to that found in Mendel’s work. Weldon’s dissent from Mendelism could well serve to inspire those attempting now to cast Mendelian tradition aside in order to reshape genetics teaching for a genomic age.

Two Explanations of Evolutionary Progress

Natural selection explains how living forms are fitted to theirconditions of life. Darwin argued that selection also explains what hecalled “the gradual advancement of the organisation,” i.e.evolutionary progress. Present-day selectionists disagree. In theirview, it is happenstance that sustains conditions favorable to progress,and therefore happenstance, not selection, that explains progress. Iargue that the disagreement here turns not on whether there exists aselection-based condition bias – a belief now attributed to Darwin – but on whether there needs to be such a bias for selection to count as explaining progress. In Darwins own view, selection explained progressso far as more complex organisms have the selective advantage whenselection operates unimpeded. I show that these two explanations ofevolutionary progress, selection and happenstance, answer for theirobjectivity to different standards, and for their truth or falsehood todifferent features of the world.

Beyond the “Mendel-Fisher controversy”

Worries about fraudulent data should give way to broader critiques of Mendels legacy One hundred and fifty years ago, Gregor Mendel delivered his lectures on “Experiments on Plant Hybrids,” going on to publish them in 1866 (1). Around the world, celebrations of the monk whose work with pea varieties made him the father of genetics are under way. Mendel has alas acquired another, less auspicious title, as “the father of scientific misconduct,” owing to suspicions that he faked some of his data (2). The suspicions have turned out to be groundless (3, 4). Along the way, however, they not only damaged Mendels reputation unfairly but, as a look at the history of the controversy shows, sent critical discussion of his data down a sidetrack.

Language, brain function, and human origins in the Victorian debates on evolution

In The Descent of Man(1871), Charles Darwin set his theoretical sights on the diverse powers of the human mind, including the power that, for Darwin, was ‘justly considered as one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals’: the ability to use language. How did this uniquely human ‘half-art and halfinstinct’ arise? According to Darwin, the exercise of an instinct for imitation, still present in humans and their near evolutionary kin, led the progenitors of modern humans to speak the first words. Sounds imitative of natural objects and events became words for those objects and events. When these words brought an advantage in the struggle for survival, as when the utterance of a sound associated with a predator warned the group of imminent danger, then natural selection acted to preserve and accumulate these new words, along with the creatures able to speak and understand the words. Similarly, sounds imitative of ‘man’s own instinctive cries’ became words for the emotions expressed in those cries. When these words brought an advantage in the struggle for mates, as when the utterance of a sound associated with love or rage made for more successful courtship, then sexual selection acted to preserve and accumulate these new words and word-users. And while language grew thus through imitation, natural selection and sexual selection, the brain and the vocal organs of language-users became, through use, ever better at thinking and speaking. Because such effects of use were heritable, argued Darwin, these language-induced refinements of body and mind were transmitted to future generations, where more use brought further refinements. And so, gradually, articu-

Did Darwin change his mind about the Fuegians

Shocked by what he considered to be the savagery he encountered in Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin ranked the Fuegians lowest among the human races. An enduring story has it, however, that Darwin was later so impressed by the successes of missionaries there, and by the grandeur they discovered in the native tongue, that he changed his mind. This story has served diverse interests, religious and scientific. But Darwin in fact continued to view the Fuegians as he had from the start, as lowly but improvable. And while his case for their unity with the other human races drew on missionary evidence, that evidence concerned emotional expression, not language.

The Unmaking of a Modern Synthesis: Noam Chomsky, Charles Hockett, and the Politics of Behaviorism, 1955-1965

A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916–2000). In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and—famously with Chomsky—the place of political discipline within a scientific life.

Race and language in the Darwinian tradition (and what Darwin’s language–species parallels have to do with it)

What should human languages be like if humans are the products of Darwinian evolution? Between Darwins day and our own, expectations about evolutions imprint on language have changed dramatically. It is now a commonplace that, for good Darwinian reasons, no language is more highly evolved than any other. But Darwin, in The descent of man, defended the opposite view: different languages, like the peoples speaking them, are higher or lower in an evolutionarily generated scale. This paper charts some of the changes in the Darwinian tradition that transformed the notion of human linguistic equality from creationist heresy to evolutionist orthodoxy. Darwins position in particular is considered in detail, for there is disagreement about what it was, and about the bearing of a famous paragraph in the Descent comparing languages and species.

Cultures of evolutionary biology: Mystery of mysteries: is evolution a social construction? Michael Ruse; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 1999, pp. xii+296, Price £18.95 hardback, ISBN 0-674-467706-X, £12.95 paperback, ISBN 0-674-00543-0.

In 1981, Michael Ruse testified in court on behalf of evolutionary biology. He spoke as an expert witness, not as a biologist but a philosopher. At stake was the right of Darwinian theory to monopolize the biology textbooks and classrooms of Arkansas schoolchildren. As Ruse recalls in Mystery of mysteries, he argued that, unlike evolutionary biology, the would-be rival science, creation science, ‘fails every criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo-science’ (p. 135). With help from Stephen Jay Gould and others, the evolutionists carried the day. Two decades later, Ruse is still defending Darwinism (to quote the title of one of his many books). Now, it is not creationists but social constructionists who need fending off. Once again, Ruse rides forth; and once again, victory is declared. Apart from a couple of caveats, he answers the question in his subtitle, ‘Is evolution a social construction?’, with a resounding ‘no’. His title comes from a letter to the geologist Charles Lyell from the astronomer and theorist of scientific method John F. W. Herschel in 1836. The ‘mystery of mysteries’, wrote Herschel, was ‘the replacement of extinct species by others’. Just over a year later, Charles Darwin began secret, sustained reflection on species replacement and extinction. Herschel and Lyell were admired mentors for Darwin— he had studied their writings closely, had met Herschel in South Africa on the return leg of theBeagle voyage, and now socialized regularly with Lyell. Unsurprisingly, Darwin acquired his sense of where the scientific action was from these men. Equally unsurprisingly, his thinking soon took a dissident turn. He came to believe that some

A critique of kitcher on eugenic reasoning

Abstract Pre-natal genetic tests prompt questions about when, if ever, it is legitimate to choose against a potential life. Philip Kitcher has argued that test-based decisions should turn not on whether a potential life would have a disease (understood as dysfunction), but whether that life would be of low quality. I draw attention to difficulties with both parts of this argument, showing, first, that Kitcher ignores distinctions upon which the case for disease as dysfunction depends; and, second, that his analysis of quality of life tacitly, and controversially, links high quality to normal functioning. Kitchers chief complaint about disease considerations—that they inappropriately privilege the functional goals of the body over the personal goals of the individual—turns out to bear much more directly upon quality-of-life considerations than disease considerations.