# How a scholarly spat shaped a century of genetic research
**URL:** https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236
**Category:** Conversation
**Tags:** Science, History
**Created:** [July 25, 2023, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236 "2023-07-25T13:20:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Dan\_Eastwood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Dan_Eastwood)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/1 "2023-07-25T13:20:40Z")
**How a scholarly spat shaped a century of genetic research**
An interesting mention of “counterfactual history” here. _How might things have been different?_
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02310-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02310-4)
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### Author:  [@John\_Harshman](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/John_Harshman)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/2 "2023-07-25T15:05:31Z")
And the author of the review would appear to be a physicist.
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### Author:  [@John\_Harshman](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/John_Harshman)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/3 "2023-07-25T15:05:57Z")
The review, and perhaps the book, seem afflicted with “third way” biology. No, epigenetic inheritance is not a thing. Bateson was right at least as far as inheritance goes. There seems a confusion here between expression of traits, affected by all sorts of factors, and inheritance, which is genetic.
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### Author:  [@sfmatheson](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/sfmatheson)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 3:43pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/4 "2023-07-25T15:43:20Z")
> [@John\_Harshman](#):
>
> And the author of the review would appear to be a physicist.
Or not: [Brian Hall - Department of Biology - Dalhousie University](https://www.dal.ca/faculty/science/biology/faculty-staff/professors-emeriti/brian-hall/brian-hall.html)
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### Author:  [@John\_Harshman](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/John_Harshman)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 6:06pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/5 "2023-07-25T18:06:00Z")
> [@sfmatheson](#):
>
> Or not: [Brian Hall - Department of Biology - Dalhousie University](https://www.dal.ca/faculty/science/biology/faculty-staff/professors-emeriti/brian-hall/brian-hall.html)
Odd. When I clicked on his name in the review, Nature sent me to a bunch of physics/materials science papers supposedly authored by him.
But the only one on which he was actually an author was the review itself. Nature’s search is broken.
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### Author:  [@sfmatheson](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/sfmatheson)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 6:54pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/6 "2023-07-25T18:54:02Z")
> [@John\_Harshman](#):
>
> Nature’s search is broken.
This would never happen at PLOS. 🫣
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### Author:  [@Joe\_Felsenstein](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Joe_Felsenstein)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 8:51pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/7 "2023-07-25T20:51:15Z")
Bateson was right about inheritance, Weldon was right about selection on continuous traits being important. The “mutationists” who concluded that the basic changes of evolution were the result of mutations of large effect, and who thought of changes in individuals rather than in populations, were wrong. Weldon’s adherence to Galton and Pearson’s law of Ancestral Heredity was wrong.
This mess started to clear up in the 1910s, culminating in R.A. Fisher’s 1918 paper. I don’t really see how since then the whole field has been fundamentally wrong and needs to be not only rethought but redone. This seems to be a Thing: finding some obscure historical oddity and darkly hinting that it has polluted an entire field ever since. And that the field needs to be led from now on by the author of the historical work.
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### Author:  [@Puck\_Mendelssohn](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Puck_Mendelssohn)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2023, 8:51pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/8 "2023-07-25T20:51:23Z")
> [@John\_Harshman](#):
>
> Nature’s search is broken.
Perhaps it’s the waiting time problem.
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### Author:  [@John\_Harshman](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/John_Harshman)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2023, 1:51am UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/9 "2023-07-26T01:51:16Z")
> [@Joe\_Felsenstein](#):
>
> Weldon was right about selection on continuous traits being important.
But of course Weldon didn’t understand the genetic basis of those so-called continuous traits in discrete alleles of multiple genes.
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### Author:  [@Joe\_Felsenstein](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Joe_Felsenstein)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2023, 4:13pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/10 "2023-07-26T16:13:46Z")
> [@John\_Harshman](#):
>
> But of course Weldon didn’t understand the genetic basis of those so-called continuous traits in discrete alleles of multiple genes.
Of course, as I mentioned, Weldon instead invoked Galton and Pearson’s regression formula known as the Law of Ancestral Heredity. Each side would say that the variation studied by the other was not important in evolution. Both were wrong about that. Bateson was right about the mode of inheritance; but he and is fellow “mutationists” more or less ignored natural selection.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [August 2, 2023, 4:14pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/how-a-scholarly-spat-shaped-a-century-of-genetic-research/16236/11 "2023-08-02T16:14:21Z")
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