Events: detail
Science and Technology Studies Seminar: The Professor and the Pea: W.F.R. Weldon's critique of Mendelism
- Hosted by:
- UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies
- Speaker:
-
Greg Radick, Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds
- Starts:
- November 22, 2007 at 05:00 pm
- Ends:
- November 22, 2007 at 06:00 pm
- Location:
- University College London, Department of Science & Technology Studies, Room G3, 22 Gordon Square, London, WC1E 6BT United Kingdom
- Maps:
Description
Along with Karl Pearson, the English zoologist W. F. R. Weldon is well remembered as one of the “biometricians” who, in the early years of the twentieth century, led opposition to the new “Mendelism.” Less well remembered is that Weldon – at the time professor at Oxford – developed one of his most effective anti-Mendelian polemics on the basis of his own researches with the emblematic Mendelian organism: the pea plant. Drawing on Weldon’s unpublished notebooks, correspondence and manuscripts, including the book on heredity left unfinished at his unexpected early death in 1906, this paper aims to recover an unfamiliar vision of the biometrical alternative to Mendelism, and so to clarify some problems in historians’ understanding of why Mendelism became as successful as it did.
- Registration required:
- Yes
- Free:
- Yes
For more information
- Contact person:
- UCL Dept of Science & Technology Studies
- Phone:
- 020 7679 2929
- Email:
- sts [ at ] ucl.ac.uk
- Website:
- Science and Technology Studies Seminar: The Professor and the Pea: W.F.R. Weldon's critique of Mendelism
