A few weeks ago I reread large portions of A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. There were several chapters near the end which focused a great deal on the men that Galton mentored; from his protege Karl Pearson to the eventual nemesis of the Galtonian tradition in biology, William Bateson. In particular, I was struck by the social and scientific dynamics of the first 10 years of the 20th century, when Mendelism broke onto the scene and slowly eroded the primacy of biometrical theories of inheritance. A deeper exploration of the topic can be found in Every ratio 3:1!!!, a review of Will Provine’s The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. The short of it is that Bateson was right, Pearson was wrong.
The inevitable outcome was clear soon enough, Pearson and Walter Weldon had the advantage in 1900, as they were in many ways the heirs of the Darwinian tradition during a period of relative eclipse. But over the decade acolyte after acolyte of the biometrical school defected to the Mendelian camp. It was an acrimonious and personal battle, and to a large extent it seems that ego got in the way of clear thinking as the pieces necessary for the reconciliation of biometry and Mendelism were already there. For some reason it took R. A. Fisher in 1918 to finish the job, but by then Pearson’s biological ideas were moribund, and perhaps fittingly he was superseded by Fisher as the eminent statistical scientist of the day (see R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist).
Nevertheless, Pearson was a genius. He was the one who formalized many of Galton’s intuitive statistical ideas, and he is arguably the father of mathematical statistics. His interests were broad and wide ranging, from mathematics to German philosophy and literature, and Left politics (he was a socialist). Though William Bateson was certainly a competent scientist he was mathematically inept, and this posed serious problems in terms of his higher education. He had to make recourse to an extended period of special tutoring so as to pass the math requirements at university. From what I understand as it was he barely made the grade. From what I have read about these two individuals I think it is plausible that they were about 2 standard deviations apart in intelligence. Pearson likely had an IQ of no lower than 140, and possibly as high as 160, while I would guess that Bateson was in in the 115 to 130 range. Bateson was smart, but it is clear from the biographical data that he was weak when it came to analysis and abstraction. In contrast, Pearson was unquestionably a master at any academic endeavor at which he tried his hand.
And yet Pearson was wrong and Bateson was right. In A Life of Sir Francis Galton the author notes that to Bateson Pearson’s mathematical models were absolutely impenetrable. But nevertheless he was confident enough to assert that Pearson was wrong; he had the facts, and the facts suggested to him that Pearson was wrong. If Pearson’s formal theoretical structure was coherent it was still based on false premises. I won’t attempt to recapitulate Pearson’s model of heredity; it’s confusing, perhaps I’m stupid, and it’s wrong anyhow. Pearson’s derivations might have been brilliant, but they were a house of cards, and Bateson saw through it because he had grasped reality by the tail and diagnosed the joints around which nature was carved. The elucidation of the structure of DNA ultimately validated in a biophysical sense the truths of Mendelism: inheritance as a discrete and digital process.
I’m not here claiming that William Bateson had a “sixth sense” about the nature of reality which compensated for his lack of analytic power vis-a-vis Karl Pearson. Bateson was rather late to the game when it came to accepting that chromosomes were essential in mediating the Mendelian process. Perhaps when it came to his instincts in regards to Mendelism he was just lucky, though his greater familiarity with the empirical data in comparison to Pearson is likely to have been very important. Pearson was a theoretician, Bateson was an experimentalist and observationist. As I note above, the biometricians probably slowed the advance of evolutionary biology by several years, perhaps a decade, due to their use of political capital in appointments and funding to resist the rising tide of Mendelism. The emergence of a mathematically fluent partisan of Mendelism in R. A. Fisher sealed the deal because his work tied all the lose ends in terms of showing how a large number of genes could easily produce the continuous traits which were the bread & butter of the biometricians. But I think this episode is illustrative of a reality in regards to natural science: it’s a noisy process fraught with human error and egotism, but in the end Nature renders the final verdict. I’ve lingered on Pearson’s cognitive brilliance because it seems rather clear that the mathematical wizardy he employed intimidated many empirical biologists, including William Bateson. The emperor had no clothes, and it took years to come to an agreement as to that fact.
To some it can be likened to the reaction of biologists and geologists to the pronouncements of Lord Kelvin that their inferences about the age of the earth had to be wrong because of the nature of physics. Kelvin’s brilliance was undeniable, and the prestige of physics was based on the proven power of its method, but in the end he was wrong, and the biologists and geologists were right.
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