Bateson, William

(b. Whitby, England, 8 August 1861; d. Merton, London, England, 8 February 1926)

morphology, genetics.

Bateson was the son of William Henry and Anna Aiken Bateson, His father, as classical scholar, had become master of St, John’s College, Cambridge (1857), and Bateson lived in that university town until 1910. In that year he moved to London and remained there until his death.

Marked as “a vague and aimless boy” while at Rugby, Bateson confounded the doubters by taking first-class honors in the natural science tripos at Cambridge, from which he received the B.A. in 1883, A student and later (1885–1910) a fellow of St,. John’s College, his interest early came to focus on zoology and morphology. Contributing largely to his scientific development were A. Sedgwick and W. F. R. Weldon at Cambridge and, while he was in Maryland and Virginia during 1883 and 1884, W. K. Brooks at Johns Hopkins. Bateson was ill-trained in physics and chemistry and knew virtually no mathematics. His abilities as a classicist were outstanding.

Bateson’s career may be divided into three periods. During the first period (1883–1900) he turned from orthodox embryological Darwinizing to the rigorous study of heredity and variation. Dissatisfied with old truths, he was seeking a new approach to evolutionary studies. His views were distinctly out of favor with conventional zoologists, and he won no regular university teaching appointments. Bateson’s Mendelian period opened in 1900 and continued until about 1915. His contributions toward the establishment of the Mendelian conception of heredity and variation were enormous, and he finally began to harvest popular and professional esteem. The third period (ca. 1915–1926) reintroduced the discordant element. Bateson continually attacked the new glory, chromosome theory, and concentrated upon problems of somatic segregation. Once a radical, furiously disturbing his zoological elders, he now seemed conservative. His science, genetics (so named by Bateson in 1905–1906), turned largely toward chromosomes and genes. As a result, Bateson, who had been a central figure, became isolated from current developments.

Bateson received the Balfour Studentship at Cambridge in 1887. His other Cambridge positions included deputy in zoology to Alfred Newton in 1899, reader in zoology in 1907, and finally professor of genetics in 1908. His was the first such chair in Britain. In 1910 he became the first director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution, then at Merton. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1894 and belonged to numerous other societies. Among his many honors were the Darwin Medal (1904), presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1914), the Royal Medal (1920), and election as a trustee of the British Museum (1922).

Bateson’s Cambridge training had emphasized genealogical reconstruction. Such work promised the recovery of a generalized view of the history of life, but it could tell very little about how such great changes had actually come to pass. True progress in evolutionary studies must, Bateson believed, reject customary phylogenetic ambitions and turn to the process wherein evolutionary novelty emerges, that is, the phenomena of heredity and, particularly, variation. From about 1887 such detailed investigation dominated Bateson’s activity. He searched the literature and began experimental hybridization, demanding exact knowledge of the transmission of heritable features from parent to immediate offspring. Then, in May 1900, he read Mendel’s report of 1866 on breeding experiments with peas.

The rediscovery of Mendel’s work transformed Bateson’s career. He reinterpreted experimental data already available in Mendelian terms. Simultaneously with L. Cuénot he proved that Mendelian behavior holds for animals as well as plants. His research group, which included R. C. Punnett, E. R. Saunders, and L. Doncaster, demonstrated the existence of epistatic modifications of simple Mendelian ratios and the phenomena of reversion and (as it was subsequently designated) linkage. As spokesman for the new discipline Bateson knew no peer, yet his work was financed with great difficulty and only by personal funds, private gifts, and the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society. Reports to the latter body were the main vehicle of Mendelian publication in Britain until Bateson and Punnett began the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

Behind all technical achievements persisted Bateson’s concern for the “salt of biology,” evolution theory, and its indispensable adjunct, the determinative mechanism(s) of inheritance. The chromosome theory of inheritance, rising from bare enunciation in 1902 to evident triumph around 1920, offered a formed, material element in the cell nucleus as the agent of heredity. But Bateson demanded a direct—indeed, a visible—correlation between any chromosome and consequent bodily feature, and her found none. Moreover, chromosome theory was patently materialistic, and this, for numerous and complex reasons, he could not tolerate. In place of the chromosome theory Bateson devised an ostensibly nonmaterialistic vibratory theory of inheritance, founded on force and motion. This theory and the phenomena that appeared consistent with it (especially plant variegation) were utterly unacceptable to most geneticists, and in its defense Bateson became increasingly an advocate without adversaries. Significant discussion of his views largely disappeared from leading genetics journals.

An ardent evolutionist, Bateson vigorously opposed the doctrine of natural selection. Like Fleeming Jenkin and St. G. Mivart, he failed to see how few and slight variations, the raw material for Darwinian selection, could be truly useful. He rejected the entire “utility” aspect of orthodox Darwinism. What, then, could be the source of undeniable evolutionary change? The answer was found in the organismic quality of any significant biological variation. Genuine evolutionary novelty was, therefore, not the product of gradual accumulation of seemingly trivial variations but the consequence of saltatory or major modifications. Variation was the driving force of evolutionary change, and Bateson always hoped to find its explanation in his vibratory theory of heredity. Perhaps the disputatious Bateson’s most famous public battle was against the biometrical school led by W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson. At issue was the nature of evolutionary change and how it might best be studied. Bateson emphasized the imprecision in individual instances of statistical analyses and decried the biometricians’ ardent defense of natural selection. In straightforward Mendelism he found both support for evolutionary discontinuities and a dependable experimental approach to matters of descent.

Bateson’s broad interests and remarkable personality greatly influenced his scientific thought. A man of deep and well-cultivated aesthetic sensibilities (he was a major collector of Oriental works of art and the creations of William Blake), he despaired before the harsh spiritual and economic realities of late Victorian England. He was at once a radical empiricist, wanting his facts absolutely secure, and a rather unconscious intuitionist. From his intuition, fed by insights taken from transcedental morphology, he developed his conception of the functionally integral organism. The same view informs his conception of human society, in which an intellectual elite is struggling desperately against a rising and insensitive middle-class horde bent on leveling all men to their own mediocrity. To Bateson this was not life, but mere existence. This complex of ideas and intuitions set Bateson firmly against utilitarian rationalism and its near neighbor, materialism. In natural selection and the chromosome theory he saw both at work, and would have none of them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. With few and unimportant exceptions Bateson’s scientific contributions were collected and reissued by R. C. Punnett as Scientific Papers of William Bateson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1928). His often remarkable general biological and social essays are available in B. Bateson, ed., William Bateson, F.R.S. Naturalist. His Essays and Addresses (Cambridge, 1928). Bateson’s major publications are Materials for the Study of Variation Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Orgin of Species (London, 1894); Reports to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society, I–V (London, 1902–1909); Mendel’s Priniciples of Heredity. A Defence (Cambridge, 1902); Mendel’s Principles of Heredity (Cambridge, 1909, 1913); and Problems of Genetics (New Haven, 1913). Punnettt has provided a bibliography of Bateson’s writings in Scientific Papers, II 487–494.

The Bateson papers, in the possession of his family, constitute an extensive and exceptionally valuable archive. A comprehensive selection of scientific items from this collection has been microfilmed (a copy is deposited in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) and roughly catalogued. All aspects of Bateson’s career are represented, including his large and interesting correspondence, unpublished speculative essays, and abundant documentation to published works. These papers are described in The Mendel Newsletter, no. 2 (Philadelphia, 1968). Lesser collections of Bateson MSS are held by the John Innes Institute (to join the University of East Anglia, Norwich, ca. 1970), the Royal Society of London, and the American Philosophical Society.

II. Secondary Literature. The principal biographical source is B. Bateson, “Memoir,” in William Bateson, F.R.S. Naturalist, pp. 1–160. Other notice, particularly concerned with his scientific endeavor, are R. C. Punnett, “William Bateson,” in Edinburgh Review, 244 (1926). 71–86; and T. H. Morgan, “William Bateson,” in Science, 63 (1926), 531’535. See also O. Renner, “William Bateson and Carl Correns,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematische-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, 6 (1960–1961), 159–184; L. C. Dunn, A Short History of Gentics (New York, 1965), pp. 55–87; and C. D. Darlington, The Facts of Life (London, 1953), pp. 95–116. An excellent discussion of Bateson’s peculiar later conception of the heredity mechanism is R. C. Swinburne, “The Presence-and-Absence Theory,” in Annals of Science, 18 (1962), 131–145. Bateson’s refusal to pursue phylogenetic reconstruction is recorded in W. Coleman, “On Bateson’s Motives for Studying Variation,” in Actes du XI^eCongrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, V (Warsaw-Cracow, 1968), 335–339.

William Coleman