From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
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 inheritance.
Biography
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 was the first to name
research on heredity with "genetics"
from the
Greek word "genetikos" (the
produced) in
1906, three years before
Wilhelm Johannsen used the
word "gene"
for 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.
References
-
W. B. Provine (1971) The
Origins of Theoretical
Population Genetics. University
of Chicago Press.
