William Bateson

English biologist

• Born: August 8, 1861; Whitby, England
• Died: February 8, 1926; London, England

Often called the father of genetics, William Bateson was a British evolutionary biologist who founded the study of genetics. An early proponent of the rediscovered Mendelian principles, his work provided the base for a modern understanding of heredity as it applies to evolution.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Genetics

Early Life

Bateson was born on August 8, 1861, in Whitby, England, to Anna Aikin Bateson and William Henry Bateson, the headmaster at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge. The second of six siblings, Bateson expressed a desire to become a naturalist from an early age, although he showed little interest in his studies at Rugby School in Cambridge. In 1879, he enrolled in St. John’s College, where his father was still headmaster, to study morphology and evolution. He graduated with a BA in natural sciences in 1883.

During the summers of 1883 and 1884, Bateson travelled to the United States where he worked under American zoologist William Brooks at the Chesapeake Bay Marine Biological station, a part of John Hopkins University. He next participated in major field expeditions to Central Asia and Egypt where he collected data on how environment relates to species variation. He returned to Cambridge in 1889 as a researcher and began an extensive six-year study of the structural and developmental mechanisms of variation.

In 1896, Bateson married Caroline Beatrice Durham, who contributed an enormous amount of work to her husband’s studies and wrote his biography after his death, published in 1928. The Batesons had three sons: John, Martin, and Gregory. Gregory Bateson later became a respected anthropologist. Tragically, John was killed in World War I, and Martin committed suicide a short time later.

Life’s Work

In 1894, Bateson published Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origins of the Species, a book compiling his observations and including an argument for the modification of Charles Darwin’s concept of variation. While working with Brooks in Chesapeake Bay, Bateson had become doubtful of Darwin’s theory that speciation could be explained by natural selection. Further, he disagreed with Darwin’s assertion that evolution happened gradually over a long period of time; he hypothesized that species experienced evolution in abrupt changes occurring once in a while. This theory was further developed by Stephen Jay Gould and is now known as punctuated equilibrium. But Bateson’s primary interest was in speciation, and he set out to find examples of variation within a species. He believed that discontinuities would provide a clue as to how new species were formed. He found numerous examples of discontinuities within a species appearing in nature and published his findings in Materials for the Study of Variation.

Bateson then wondered what happened to those discontinuities over generations; he began experimentally breeding animals and plants to study how traits were inherited in hybrids. He hypothesized that each trait was a separate unit, but his research remained unverified at a time when most scientists supported what were known as “blending theories.” The predominant theory of inheritance at the time was Francis Galton’s Law of Ancestral Heredity; a flawed mathematical prediction that calculated the probability of offspring bearing the characteristics of their ancestors.

In 1900, Bateson came across a long-forgotten article written by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian scientist and monk who had studied inheritance in pea plants. Mendel had discovered that organisms inherit traits in pairs, often with one dominant and one recessive trait. How those factors, as Mendel called them, are inherited is a matter of chance depending on their random recombination within the offspring. With Mendel’s research, Bateson realized the full implications of his own work; he had discovered a new field of study that he called genetics.

Bateson was an early and enthusiastic proponent of the then-deceased Mendel, but his colleagues were more skeptical of the work. Bateson’s rival, a biometrician named Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, argued that Mendel’s research could easily be explained using Galton’s Law of Ancestral Heredity. A furious Bateson entered a rebuttal to Weldon’s criticisms in 1902 with his publication of Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence. After Weldon’s death in 1906, there continued to be fierce debate between biometricians (scientists who study biological data through mathematics and statistics) who sided with Galton’s theory, and those who sided with Bateson and his Mendelian theories. The debate, which primarily focused on the possibility of Bateson’s theory of discontinuous change within species, was put to rest when biologist and statistician R. A. Fisher demonstrated that Mendelian factors could be reconciled with Darwin’s theory of continuous change. Still, the debate marked the beginning of distaste for Bateson’s work among Darwinians.

In his further studies of Mendelian genetics, Bateson is credited with coining several terms including allelomorph, later shortened to allele, which describes the singular of the paired traits attributed to each gene. For example, offspring inherit two alleles for each gene—one from each parent. (The term genotype was coined in 1909 by botanist Wilhelm Johannsen. It was later shortened to gene.) Bateson also coined the terms zygote, as well as heterozygote and homozygote. Heterozygote refers to an organism that receives a different allele from each parent; homozygote refers to an organism that receives the same allele from each parent.

In the early 1900s, Bateson began collaborating with geneticist Reginald Punnett at the University of Cambridge. The two worked to establish the field of genetics at the university. Together they published the first account of gene linkage, after noticing that not all of the “crosses” in their experiments with pea plants illustrated the Mendelian law of independent assortment. Some plants, they observed, were yielding the same phenotypes (observable traits) more often than predicted. Thus, Bateson and Punnett—along with botanist and geneticist Edith Rebecca Saunders—proposed the concept of genetic linkage, or the theory that certain alleles were coupled with each other and thus produced more frequently. At the time, the scientists could not explain why linkage occurred; a few years later, Thomas Hunt Morgan, experimenting with fruit flies, was the first to deduce that alleles were physical objects, and that linkage occurred when two alleles were located closely on the same chromosome.

As a professor of biology at Cambridge, Bateson cofounded the Cambridge School of Genetics in 1908. He left the school in 1910 to accept the first directorship at the John Innes Horticultural Institute in London. The same year, he and Punnett cofounded the Journal of Genetics. Bateson published Problems of Genetics in 1913. He founded Britain’s Genetics Society in 1919.

Bateson adamantly rejected Morgan’s theory of the chromosome’s role in inheritance for many years. He preferred his own “vibratory theory,” which was widely disparaged. He eventually—and publicly—accepted the concept after visiting Morgan’s lab in 1922. Bateson, recalled by his contemporaries as a fiery instigator, was offered knighthood in his later life, but he declined the honor. He died in London on February 8, 1926.

Impact

It is only recently that Bateson’s arguments have gained traction in the field of evolutionary biology. Several biographers have drawn a parallel between Mendel and Bateson in that respect; they have both benefitted from “rediscovery.” The late Alan Cock and Donald Forsdyke were particularly interested in Bateson, noting that his research—if not the failed theories that saw him ostracized by mainstream science—could possibly provide a link between the two separate branches of evolutionary biology popularized in recent years by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, respectively.

Still, it is universally recognized that Bateson’s work in genetics helped set in motion twentieth-century advancements in the understanding of the human genome; from Morgan’s fruit flies to the work of Watson and Crick. Due to parallel advancements in cellular biology, gene linkage in particular of Bateson’s discoveries has laid the groundwork for studies in genetic mapping and recombination. And with his coinage of the term genetics, he is credited with the ever-expanding field that has grown to include, among other studies, biochemical and molecular genetics.

Bibliography

Bateson, Beatrice. William Bateson, Naturalist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1928. Print. A collection of Bateson’s essays and addresses, along with a memoir written by his wife. The book seeks to reconcile Bateson’s scientific vision and advancements with his posthumous reputation.

Bateson, William, and Gregor Mendel. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence. 1902. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. A reproduction of Bateson’s 1902 groundbreaking commentary on and translation of Mendel’s papers on hybridization.

Cock, Alan G., and Donald R. Forsdyke. Treasure Your Exceptions: The Science and Life of William Bateson. New York: Springer, 2008. Print. An in-depth account of some of Bateson’s most stunning achievements, including the rediscovery of Mendelian principles.