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

Abstract

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.