Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species (1894) by William Bateson

by William Bateson

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Unknown Binding

First published August 14, 1997

About the author

British biologist William Bateson published the first English translation of work of Gregor Johann Mendel in 1900, introduced the term "genetics," and founded this science.

A mother bore on the coast bore this son of William Henry Bateson, master of college of Saint John in Cambridge. Rugby school and college of Saint John in Cambridge educated him, who graduated with bachelor of arts in 1883 with a first in natural sciences.

Taking up embryology, he went to the United States to investigate the development of Balanoglossus.
This hemichordate led to his interest in vertebrate origins. In 1883/1884, he worked in the laboratory of William Keith Brooks at the Chesapeake zoological laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Turning from morphology to study methods of evolution, he returned to England as a fellow of Saint John. Studying variation and heredity, he traveled in west-central Asia.

He worked on biological variation to 1900.

Approach of Charles Robert Darwin to the collection of comprehensive examples, and quantitative biometric methods of Francis Galton strongly influenced Bateson, whose published work systematically studied the structural variation that living organisms display and perhaps shed the light on the mechanism of biological evolution before 1900. His first significant contribution shows discontinuous or dimorphic, not normal, distribution of some biological characteristics, such as the length of forceps in earwigs. He saw the persistence of two forms in one population as a challenge to the then current conceptions of the mechanism of heredity and says "The question may be asked, does the dimorphism of which cases have now been given represent the beginning of a division into two species?”

In Materials for the study of variation in 1894, Bateson took this survey of biological variation significantly further. He showed continuous "meristic" biological variation for some characters, and discontinuous "substantive" variation for other characteristics. Because of the perceived problem of the "swamping effect of intercrossing," the selective force of evolution not easily and ably "perfected" quantitative characters, according to Charles Robert Darwin, but Bateson in common proposed that it ably perfected discontinuously varying characters. A homeotic body part replaces another expected part in variations that he noted among other interesting variations. He studied the animal variations that included bees with legs instead of antennae, crayfish with extra oviducts, and polydactyly, extra ribs, and males with extra nipples in humans. Importantly, Bateson wrote, "The only way in which we may hope to get at the truth [concerning the mechanism of biological Heredity] is by the organization of systematic experiments in breeding, a class of research that calls perhaps for more patience and more resources than any other form of biological enquiry. Sooner or later such an investigation will be undertaken and then we shall begin to know."

In 1897, he reported some significant conceptual and methodological advances in his study of variation. “I have argued that variations of a discontinuous nature may play a prepondering part in the constitution of a new species.” His biometric critics misconstrued his definition of discontinuity of variation; he attempts a clarification of his terms to silence them: "a variation is discontinuous if, when all the individuals of a population are breeding freely together, there is not simple regression to one mean form, but a sensible preponderance of the variety over the intermediates… The essential feature of a discontinuous variation is therefore that, be the cause what it may, there is not complete blending between variety and type. The variety persists and is not “swamped by intercrossing”. Nevertheless, Edith Rebecca Saunders, his pupil, conducted a series of breed