Background

William Bateson was born on August 8, 1861, in Whitby. Bateson was the son of William Henry and Anna Aiken Bateson. His father, a 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.

Education

Bateson was first educated at Rugby School and then he took honors in the natural science tripos at Cambridge, from which he received the Bachelor of Arts 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.

Career

After two summers of study (1883 and 1884) under W. K. Brooks in America, Bateson published papers arguing for the position of Balanoglossus as a primitive chordate. Through this work, he gained initial recognition as a biologist, and it led to his election as a Fellow of St. John's College (1885). In subsequent years Bateson became an outspoken critic of traditional biology. While he demanded high scientific standards for his own work and other's, his ideas were not popular, and he repeatedly failed to gain teaching appointments. His research during the early years of his career was meagerly funded through lectures and temporary fellowships, such as the Balfour Studentship, which he received in 1887. Bateson's own program of research included rigorous experimentation and the extensive collection of facts. Through a survey of information acquired in this manner and the application of inductive reasoning, one could, Bateson believed, reach firm scientific conclusions.

From 1886 to 1894 his work centered on the collection of information on variation in animals. During the following years, Bateson began an ambitious program of breeding experiments. He wished to know exactly the nature of the transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring. Through his work on heredity and variation, Bateson became peculiarly well suited to recognize the significance of Gregor Mendel's work. First published in 1866 and then forgotten, this work on the inheritance of characters in garden peas was discovered by Hugo De Vries in 1900. Bateson soon also read the republished paper and immediately advanced the view to students and colleagues. Fearing that Mendel's view would be lost, Bateson formulated a vigorous defense that initiated a bitter controversy but ensured that Mendel would not easily be forgotten. For Bateson, Mendel's view provided an answer to some vexing biological questions. It answered the question of how a variation could remain distinct when the variable organism bred back into a large population of the normal type. Mendel's view also provided an experimental and quantitative method by which discrete characters could be followed through generations - a rigor that appealed to Bateson.

During the ten years following his discovery of Mendel, Bateson became the foremost proselytizer for the Mendelian view. In this task, he met considerable success. These achievements led to numerous honors and improvements in Bateson's academic position. In 1907 he was invited to give a series of lectures at Yale-the Silliman Lectures, published in 1913 as Problems in Genetics. In 1910 Bateson became director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution at Merton. There he continued his research and writing, but he slowly slipped from his leading role in biology.

Despite failing health, Bateson continued his research at the John Innes Horticultural Institution until his death in 1926.

Achievements

• William Bateson's major achievement was in becoming the first scientist to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. His 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics.
  
  Bateson is credited with coining the terms "genetics," "allelomorphs" (later shortened to allele), "zygote," "heterozygote" and "homozygote." In 1908, as a Professor of Biology at Cambridge, Bateson helped establish the Cambridge School of Genetics.
  
  Bateson's achievements in science were greatly recognized, and in June 1894 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which granted him with Darwin Medal in 1904 and the Royal Medal in 1920.
  
  Another Bateson's achievement was in founding the Genetics Society in 1919, which was one of the first learned societies dedicated to Genetics. The John Innes Centre holds a Bateson Lecture in his honor at the annual John Innes Symposium.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mendel's Principles of Heredity

    (Six years after Charles Darwin announced his theory of ev...)

    1913
  • Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated With Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species 1894
  • Problems of Genetics 1913
  • Evolution in Modern Thought 1917
  • Journal of Genetics 1914

Religion

Bateson was an atheist.

Views

Bateson believed that evolution, particularly the origin of a new species, takes place by great leaps in variation (hence the term discontinuous). This view was expressed in Materials for the Study of Variation (1894). After ruling out the selective power of the environment as the driving factor in evolution, Bateson proposed that evolution can be understood through a study of inheritance which would, he expected, reveal the origin of variation-the phenomenon underlying evolutionary change.

Later in life, Bateson continued to study organisms with abnormalities and the problems of variation within the context of the origin of species. By this time, many biologists had accepted Mendel's theories. Bateson opposed chromosome theory, however, which held that genes were located on chromosomes. Chromosome theory had gained scientific support by 1910, yet Bateson found it difficult to reconcile Mendelian segregation and genetic linkage with the chromosome theory of inheritance. Toward the end of his life, Bateson came to partially accept chromosome theory, but he criticized what he perceived to be its inability to completely explain inheritance.

Quotations: "When students of other sciences ask us what is now currently believed about the origin of species, we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given way to agnosticism. Meanwhile, though our faith in evolution stands unshaken we have no acceptable account of the origin of species."

"If I may throw out a word of counsel to beginners, it is: Treasure your exceptions! When there are none, the work gets so dull that no one cares to carry it further. Keep them always uncovered and in sight. Exceptions are like the rough brickwork of a growing building which tells that there is more to come and shows where the next construction is to be."

"I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares."

"Treasure your exceptions."

"Though we must hold to our faith in the evolution of species, there is little evidence as to how it has come about, and no clear proof that the process is continuing in any considerable degree at the present time."

Membership

In June 1894 Bateson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was also a member of the British Association and of the Genetics Society, which was one of the first learned societies dedicated to Genetics.

• 

  the Royal Society of London , United Kingdom

  1894 - 1926

Personality

Bateson had a combative, forceful personality, well suited to his self-appointed role of Mendel advocate.

In addition to his research in the field of biology, Bateson continued his lifelong avocation, the collection of art. His election as a trustee of the British Museum was related to the knowledge gained through this avocation.

Physical Characteristics: Here is a description of William Bateson from the book Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Tabor, 1899-1980: "The blue locomotive of the Great Eastern Railway streaked through the countryside of Cambridgeshire. To a farmer nearby, the train's cars was a rumble of teak and steel plowing through his fields, where seedlings of barley, wheat, and oats etched their own green tracks in the springtime loam. It was early May in 1900, and the earth, like the new century itself, pulsed with possibilities.

Among the train's passengers was William Bateson, a don at St. John's College, Cambridge. Bateson, who was a zoologist, was stoop-shouldered and large. His tweed vest strained at the buttons, his handlebar mustache gleamed and only his droopy eyes saved him from looking self-satisfied or smug. He had just turned forty, and was one of Britain's chief combatants in the controversy over evolution and the theory of natural selection, still the source of strident debate more than forty years after Charles Darwin first proposed it.

When Bateson boarded in Cambridge, he had no idea that in the next sixty minutes he would read a paper that would change the course not only of his own career but of mankind's understanding of its place in the great cacophony of nature."

Quotes from others about the person

• Nora Barlow (a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin), said about Bateson: "My first introduction to the whole subject ... was when William Bateson was giving what we called his bible class, in a remote lecture room, in the back of one of the colleges. It was outside the ordinary curriculum. It was a five or six o'clock lecture. And there he introduced a small set of people into the elements of the new Genetics. Mendelism was just coming in. ... He was a brilliant lecturer and, of course, he had an entirely new view of ordinary heredity. ... It was very inspiring indeed."
  
  The Science of Life (1931) Wells, Huxley & Wells: "There remains one other temperamental type which has found expression in these discussions, and that is the brilliant sceptic as typified by the late Professor William Bateson. He accepted the facts of Evolution, if only on the palaeontological evidence, but, as the outcome of a life spent largely in the study of variation and especially of Mendelism, he developed an increasing inability to satisfy himself how any progressive variation could ever occur. He crowned his scientific career by various lectures and addresses in which he reiterated his imaginative failure. This type of agnosticism was probably the negative aspect of a passionate and unquestioning faith in the implacable unteachableness and integrity of certain Mendelian units of heredity we shall presently describe and discuss. Later work has removed much of the point of his criticisms."
  
  In the words of his wife Beatrice (1928): "He was over the stepping stones and away, scrambling up the further bank whilst the Biometricians, chiding, were still negotiating the difficulties of the first step."

Interests

• art

Connections

Bateson was married to Caroline Beatrice Durham, who helped him working as a host of undergraduate and graduate volunteers, many of whom were women. His son, Gregory Bateson, later became a prominent anthropologist and cyberneticist.

Father:

William Henry

Mother:

Anna Aiken Bateson

Wife:

Caroline Beatrice Durham

After Bateson founded the immensely successful Cambridge School of Genetics, he was helped by his wife.

collaborator:

Reginald Crundall Punnett

Reginald Crundall Punnett (20 June 1875 – 3 January 1967) was a British geneticist who co-founded, with William Bateson, the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

collaborator:

Nikolai Vavilov

In 1913-14 a leading Russian geneticist N. I. Vavilov visited Bateson, who was then the director of the John Innes Horticultural Institute. In 1925 Bateson revisited Russia.

Son:

Gregory Bateson 1904 – 1980

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. He spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in different fields of science.

teacher:

Adam Sedgwick

teacher:

Walter Weldon

Friend:

Erwin Baur

In his later years Bateson was a friend and confidant of the German Erwin Baur. Their correspondence includes their discussion of eugenics.

associate:

Gregor Mendel

Mendel, through his work on pea plants, discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits. He recognized the mathematical patterns of inheritance from one generation to the next.

References

• William Bateson, Naturalist: His Essays and Addresses Together with a Short Account of His Life
  1928
• The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics Tracing the development of population genetics through the writings of such luminaries as Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, William B. Provine sheds light on this complex field as well as its bearing on other branches of biology.
  2001
• Treasure Your Exceptions: The Science and Life of William Bateson
  2008
• Stillmeadow Daybook Provides a month-by-month account of rural life in a seventeenth-century Connecticut farmhouse restored by the author.
  1986
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1970