Science isn't perfect, it often misses obvious truths. Consider the 2005 Nobel in medicine, awarded for the work of Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren in establishing the connection between Helicobacter pylori and ulcers. After the fact you hear many stories of doctors who had stumbled onto the solution, antibiotics, long before the scientific consensus. Many others now understood why they always saw these pathogens in samples taken from patients with ulcers. Now it all makes sense, but these sort of screw ups make you wonder how far we've gone past Galen! Falsification is a decent formalization of the scientific process if you distill it down to its bare essentials, but it ignores the reality that science is executed by people, not computers. Thomas Kuhn's work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions speaks to that sociological reality, instead of a gleaming geometrical crystal city, natural science is filled with booming unplanned towns, citadels being swarmed by unexepected squatters, and castles in the hinterlands striving in vain to maintain their relevance. Even mathematics, that most rational of disciplines, is driven by an engine of intuitive insight and gestalt understanding, no matter the clean final product carved from axioms. Alas, science has a low signal to noise ratio, but paraphrasing Winston Churchill, it's the best system we've got.
Of course, because of the socially contextual nature of much of science there is a niche for historians and sociologists to study it as a subculture. It is on the great mound of noise in which the signal swims that Will Provine has established his career as the historian of evolutionary genetics. His biography of the American population geneticist Sewall Wright displayed not only an encyclopedic knowledge of the personalities who touched Wright's life, but the technical details of the theoretical biology which served as his legacy. It was with an understanding of this background that I came to Provine's The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics.
Basically a slim elaboration on his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago this text explores the social and scientific dynamics between the initial high tide of the Darwinian phase in evolutionary theory and the reemergence of its primacy during the 1920s as population genetics fused the Mendelian framework with the wealth of statistical tools that were found in the biometrical school. In the interregnum Darwin's original ideas which emphasized the importance of natural selection on continuous variation as the primary motive force for evolutionary change were relegated to the margins. A thorough survey of this period can be found in Peter J. Bowler's The Eclipse of Darwinism, but Provine's work is more narrowly focused, and tends to put the spotlight upon individuals rather than grand social movements. The importance of personality in inflating semantic confusions and mediating sociological dynamics shows exactly where much of the noise in the scientific system comes from.
In short Provine's thesis centers around the conflict between the Mendelians, led by William Bateson, and the biometricians, headed by Karl Pearson (the Pearson's correlation coefficient), and the subsequent fusion which culminated in R.A. Fisher's 1918 paper, The Correlation between relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance. The conflict between these two groups was in part on genuine scientific grounds, but Provine makes it clear that personal animosity, turf wars and inability to master the methodologies of the other side perpetuated a discord which was really much ado about nothing (and resulted in far less getting done).
The dispute had its seeds in the somewhat confused ideas of Francis Galton in the field of evolution. Unlike his cousin Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace Galton did not believe that natural selection upon continuous variation within populations was sufficient to explain evolutionary change. Like many scientists, including Thomas Huxley, Galton contended that evolution was due to the emergence of unique mutant forms, "sports," which were at sharp discontinuity with the normal variation within a population. Galton did not accept that selection upon continuous variation would induce evolutionary change because he had some peculiar ideas in regards to regression toward the population mean. He seemed to posit some sort of innate stabilizing factor within a population which kept it around a species typical mean, bounded by its range and characterized by a particular variance. So individuals at the extremes would give rise to offspring who would regress back toward the mean of the population. Mutant varieties on the other hand might offer the opportunity to break out of this tendency by generating de novo a new central tendency. Pearson, Galton's protege, pointed out that he neglected to consider that repeated generations of assortative, or selective, mating of exceptional individuals would avoid the problem of regression back toward the ancestral mean as "mediocrity" (that is, random mating of exceptional individuals with less than exceptional ones) would not dilute the offspring and successive population means would be established.1
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