The Mendel Inheritance

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. The battle lines were drawn in England in the late 19th century by William Bateson, who believed in fixed genetic inheritance, and W.F.R. Weldon, who argued that Mendel’s experiments revealed far more variation than Bateson and his supporters acknowledged. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years, and consider why the history of science has a tendency to track such controversies in antagonistic terms, often to the detriment of the science itself. Read Lorraine's piece: https://lrb.me/dastonpod Sponsored links: Use the code ’LRB’ to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb Close Readings Sing up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/crpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode of the LRB podcast is sponsored by Serious Readers,
0:04.2	whose reading lights use daylight wavelength technology, replicating the daylight spectrum as
0:08.9	closely as possible, to help you read in comfort for longer, without eye strain, especially
0:13.8	as the evenings are drawing in. Serious readers' lights are recommended by more than 500 opticians,
0:20.2	and they're easy to adjust with a
0:21.6	flexible arm and a dimmer function. Words really stand out on the page with the higher contrasts
0:27.8	that the HD light provides. So if you'd like to make reading enjoyable again with less eye
0:33.5	fatigue during darker evenings, visit www.seriousreaders.com forward slash LRB and use the promo code LRB to get £100 off any HD
0:45.0	light with free delivery in the UK. And there's a 30-day risk-free trial, so if for any reason
0:51.5	you're not happy with it, you can return the light within 30 days for free.
0:55.6	That address again, it's www.seriousreaders.com forward slash LRB. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast, I'm Thomas Jones.
1:20.8	And this week I'm talking with Lorraine Daston, director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
1:27.6	She has written on History of Probability, Wonders and Scientific Objectivity, and she has a piece
1:33.1	in the latest issue of the LRB on genetic determinism and genomic hype.
1:38.3	And it's a review of disputed inheritance, the battle over Mendel and the future of biology
1:43.3	by Gregory Raddock. Hello, Lorraine,
1:45.8	and thank you so much for joining me today. Hello, thank you very much for having me.
1:50.4	So Gregory Radick's subtitle talks about the future of biology, but his book is an investigation
1:56.5	into the past, really. And as you put it, the cure that Radick proposes for knee-jerk genetic
2:02.5	determinism is a large dose of history. And his story begins with Gregor Mendel in the 1850s. So who was
2:11.2	Mendel and what did he discover or think he'd discovered? So Mendel was a monk who lived in what was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian
2:22.4	empire, the town of Brune, and is now part of the Czech Republic. And he himself came from a
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from London Review of Books, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of London Review of Books and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.