Genetics Unzipped: The battle for biology: How Mendel came to rule the world
Posted by Kat Arney, on 11 January 2024
In the latest episode of the Genetics Unzipped podcast, we’re exploring the impact that Gregor Mendel and his populariser William Bateson have had on the past century of genetics, and asking whether there could have been a more Weldonian view of the world.
“It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we would end up with our knowledge of inheritance organised around the idea that in the first instance genes come in these two versions, dominance and recessive, and they’re associated with these unit characters, you know, yellowness, greenness, roundness, wrinkledness, cystic fibrosis, black… That categorical thinking I think is problematic, it’s problematic scientifically and it’s problematic socially.”
Prof. Greg Radick, author of Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology
Genetics Unzipped is the podcast from The Genetics Society. Full transcript, links and references available online at GeneticsUnzipped.com.
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