The relative roles of politics and science: William Bateson, black slavery, eugenics and speciation
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Genetics, Ethical Issues, Legal Issues, Science Policy
- Keywords
- genes, biohistory, black emancipation, civil war, polymorphism, Mendel, speciation, politics and science, eugenics, slavery
- Copyright
- © 2014 Forsdyke
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. The relative roles of politics and science: William Bateson, black slavery, eugenics and speciation. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e294v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.294v1
Abstract
William Bateson’s background and training suggest sympathy with the black emancipation movement. Yet the movement’s success is attributed more to battles between political figures, than between scientists with contending views on the biology of racial differences. Perhaps, in the long term, Bateson’s contributions to slavery andeugenic issues will be seen as no less important than those of politicians. Mendel’sdiscovery of what we now know as “genes” languished until seized upon by Bateson in 1900. For six exhausting years he struggled to win scientific acceptance of these biological character-determining units. Later, he pressed the Mendelian message home to the general public, opposing simplistic applications of Mendelian principles to human affairs, and arguing that minor genic differences that distinguished races – e.g. skin colour – can seldom initiate new species. Indeed, the spark that initiates a divergence into two species can be non-genic. We are one reproductively isolated population, the human species.