Gregory Radick

University of Leeds · School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science (PRHS)

The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. The...

In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,”...

When the Origins of Species was published on 24 November 1859, its author, Charles Darwin, was near the end of a nine-week stay in the remote Yorkshire village of Ilkley. He had come for the 'water cure' - a regime of cold baths and wet sheets - and for relaxation. But he used his time in Ilkley to shore up support, through extensive correspondence...

An interdisciplinary space odyssey that takes the intellectual traveller of broad tastes on a journey from inner to outer space, from consciousness to the Cosmos. The ports of call visited along way are space and language, architectural space, the spaces of immersive virtual reality, maps as projections of power, international space as gap-riddled,...

Organismal agency, together with cognate notions such as goal-directedness, purposiveness, and teleology, has undergone a revival in recent decades and is one of the most intensively debated topics in contemporary philosophy of the life and cognitive sciences. This chapter argues that it constitutes an enormously difficult riddle in biological and...

Darwin begins his “one long argument” not in the natural world of the deep past but – surprisingly and, for some readers, disappointingly – on the present-day world of the farm, providing a detailed look at domesticated plants and animals as well as the humans who breed them. Darwin’s opening chapter divides roughly into two halves. In the first ha...

Historically, undergraduate genetics courses have disproportionately focused on the impact of genes on phenotypes, rather than multifactorial concepts which consider how a combination of genes, the environment, and gene-by-environment interactions impacts traits. Updating the curriculum to include multifactorial concepts is important to align cours...

Undergraduate genetics courses have historically focused on simple genetic models, rather than taking a more multifactorial approach where students explore how traits are influenced by a combination of genes, the environment, and gene-by-environment interactions. While a focus on simple genetic models can provide straightforward examples to promote...

This paper draws upon the history of scientific studies of inheritance in Mendel’s best-remembered model organism, the garden pea, as a source of two parables – one pessimistic, the other optimistic – on the challenges of data linkage in plants. The moral of the pessimistic parable, from the era of the biometrician-Mendelian controversy, is that th...

Two things about Gregor Mendel are common knowledge: first, that he was the “monk in the garden” whose experiments with peas in mid-nineteenth-century Moravia became the starting point for genetics; second, that, despite that exalted status, there is something fishy, maybe even fraudulent, about the data that Mendel reported. Although the notion th...

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical...

Charles Darwin never doubted the common ancestry of the human races. But he was open-minded about whether the races might nevertheless be so different from each other that they ought to be classified not as varieties of one species but as distinct species. He pondered this varieties-or-species question on and off for decades, from his time aboard t...

Thanks to his experiments on pea plants, first published in 1866, Gregor Mendel is routinely hailed as the founding father of modern genetics. But was it really his intention to uncover the laws of heredity and the particulate nature of the gene – or have these motivations been retrospectively ascribed to him in the light of present-day knowledge?...

An enduring legacy from the heyday of Mendelian genetics is talk of ‘genes for'. Such talk suggests straightforwardly that genes make characters. But for over a century, thoughtful biologists have insisted such an understanding is mistaken. For them, a gene is a chromosomal difference that, when internal and external environments are otherwise equa...

(This article summarizes and adds some new details and explanations to the Position Paper submitted to the Government of India on means of promoting sustainable seed innovation. The full (original) text of the Position Paper is also available on Research Gate. Comments are welcome on this article version as well as on the original Position Paper, t...

This is a multi-disciplinary research based position paper being prepared for Government of India on means of promoting sustainable seed innovations, i.e., promoting research and in situ innovations with agrobiodiversity by all stakeholders, especially small farmers, with the aim of enhancing their income, supporting the cause of conservation and s...

This chapter introduces the main scientific ideas associated with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and examines the public life of these ideas, above all so-called “social Darwinism”: the notion that the survival of the fittest applies to society as well as to nature. Although the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Spencer, Darw...

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, Charles Darwin purported to show that, around the world, humans of every race express their emotions in the same ways: crying when sad, smiling when happy, and so on. He claimed that this sameness afforded a “new argument” for the common descent of all the human races from a s...

Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston (eds.), Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 208. ISBN 978-0-226-31720-5. £17.50 (paperback). - Volume 50 Issue 3 - Gregory Radick

Twenty-first century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is a...

The mechanical and reductive ideals of much of modern science leave it ill-equipped to recognize, let alone account for, the agency of animals. So says a tradition of criticism well represented in the writings of the British behavioural biologist W. H. Thorpe FRS (1902-1986). This paper recovers the range of overlapping debates and developments, ph...

In answer to the question "What is the point of philosophy?," this chapter mounts an inductive argument: three of the most consequential scientists who ever lived -- Darwin, Einstein and Chomsky -- are also among the most philosophically literature scientists who ever lived. The chapter also suggests that, for the good of philosophy as well as scie...

An experiment in genetics education reveals how Mendel’s legacy holds back the teaching of science, says Gregory Radick.

When it comes to knowing about the scientific pasts that might have been – the so-called ‘counterfactual’ history of science – historians can either debate its possibility or get on with the job. The latter course offers opportunities for engaging with some of the most general questions about the nature of science, history and knowledge. It can als...

A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the replacement of behaviorism by cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a borderland, muddy and much trespassed-upon. This paper relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar...

Rasmussen Nicolas, Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 249, $35.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4214-1430-2. - Volume 60 Issue 1 - Gregory Radick

Worries about fraudulent data should give way to broader critiques of Mendel's legacy

Anyone beginning to learn about Charles Darwin (b. 1809–d. 1882) will sooner or later need to reckon with the vast body of writings by him and about him. This bibliographic guide aims to help newcomers find their way to the best of classic and recent scholarship. As the major episodes and achievements of Darwin’s life organize the main part of this...

Advocates of “Mendelism” early on stressed the usefulness of Mendelian principles for breeders. Ever since, that usefulness—and the favourable opinion of Mendelism it supposedly engendered among breeders—has featured in explanations of the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics. An important counter-tradition of commentary, however, has emphasized the wa...

As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understanding heredity, the English biologist William Bateson (1861–1926) did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening t...

Intellectual property (IP) in and around the sciences is nowadays a matter of high public as well as historical interest. Here we propose an integrative concept of IP that, drawing upon insights scattered across decades of scholarship, forges from them a framework for a new style of historical research. This expanded concept of IP takes in patents,...

Textbook presentations of genetics have changed remarkably little since their earliest days. Typically an initial chapter introduces Mendel’s pea-hybridization experiments and the lessons (‘laws’) drawn from them. Then, in succeeding chapters, those lessons are gradually qualified and supplemented out of existence. The case of dominance is an espec...

In 1894, William Bateson objected to the terms “heredity” and “inheritance” in biology, on grounds of contamination with misleading notions from the everyday world. Yet after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in the spring of 1900, Bateson promoted that work as disclosing the “principles of heredity.” For historians of science, Bateson’s change of m...

Physics matters less than we once thought to the making of Mendel. But it matters more than we tend to recognize to the making of Mendelism. This paper charts the variety of ways in which diverse kinds of physics impinged upon the Galtonian tradition which formed Mendelism's matrix. The work of three Galtonians in particular is considered: Francis...

Shocked by what he considered to be the savagery he encountered in Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin ranked the Fuegians lowest among the human races. An enduring story has it, however, that Darwin was later so impressed by the successes of missionaries there, and by the grandeur they discovered in the native tongue, that he changed his mind. This s...

Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) is a very different kind of work from On the Origin of Species (1859). This "otherness" is most extreme in the character of the explanations that Darwin offers in the Expression. Far from promoting his theory of natural selection, the Expression barely mentions that theory, i...

What Is Historiographic Evidence?BayesianismBayesianism as a Model of Historiographic ReasoningExplanationismTowards an Explanationist BayesianismApplications: SkepticismApplications: UnderdeterminationReferencesFurther Reading

The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. The...

What should human languages be like if humans are the products of Darwinian evolution? Between Darwin's day and our own, expectations about evolution's imprint on language have changed dramatically. It is now a commonplace that, for good Darwinian reasons, no language is more highly evolved than any other. But Darwin, in The descent of man, defende...

Like the people they study, historians of science make conjectures about what might have been. Unlike scientists, however, historians of science have no tradition of self-consciousness about counterfactual methods. The essays in this Focus section are conversation starters toward that missing tradition. Examining diverse sciences and periods, they...

"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love," wrote George Steiner at the start of a book (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky [1959]) published just as George Levine was entering the profession. Almost half a century later, now in retirement, Levine has written a debt-discharging book about Charles Darwin. Whether or not you agree that Darwin loves y...

After the Second World War, a renaissance in field primatology took place in the United States under the aegis of the 'new physical anthropology'. Its leader, Sherwood Washburn, envisioned a science uniting studies of hominid fossils with Darwinian population genetics, experimental functional anatomy, and field observation of non-human primates and...

Without Abstract

When philosophers look to the history of biology, they most often ask about what happened, and how best to describe it. They ask, for instance, whether molecular genetics subsumed the Mendelian genetics preceding it, or whether these two sciences have main–tained rather messier relations. Here I wish to pose a question as much about what did not ha...

It has been claimed that following the decline of Marxism and Freudianism, Darwinism has become the dominant intellectual paradigm of our day. In the mass media there are many bitter disputes between today's new Darwinians and their opponents, often over religion. But the 'neo-Darwinian paradigm' is not as simple or as seamless as either its advoca...

The importance of the concept of counterfactual history is discussed The concept might sound frivolous exercise, but a growing number of historians consider it an indispensable tool, especially for understanding political events. Despite recent rebranding as 'virtual history' or 'rerunning the tape', counterfactual history still looks to its critic...

When philosophers look to the history of biology, they most often ask about what happened, and how best to describe it. They ask, for instance, whether molecular genetics subsumed the Mendelian genetics preceding it, or whether these two sciences have maintained rather messier relations. Here I wish to pose a question as much about what did not hap...

The playback experiment – the playing back of recorded animal sounds to the animals in order to observe their responses – has twice become central to celebrated researches on non-human primates. First, in the years around 1890, Richard Garner, an amateur scientist and evolutionary enthusiast, used the new wax cylinder phonograph to record and repro...

JAMES E. STRICK, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xi+283. ISBN 0-674-00292-X. £30.95 (hardback). JAMES E. STRICK (ed.), Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001. Pp. 8007. 6 vols. ISBN 1-85506-872-9. £3...

The Cultural Conditioning Of Darwin’S Theory: Machines, competition, empire and progress fascinated the Victorians. One of the most famous scientific theories of the era, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, tells of machine-like organisms that compete, colonise and improve. To notice resemblances such as these, between the context of Darw...

Charles Darwin himself helped to start the debate on language change as a selection process. Here I examine two aspects of Darwin's contribution to this debate. Throughout I emphasize how much Darwin's own views differed from the views of present-day Darwinians. First, I consider the parallels Darwin identified between selection in language change...

In 1865, Francis Galton published two articles on 'Hereditary Talent and Character'. Already in his early forties, he was known in scientific circles as a geographer with a flair for quantification, most recently working in meteorology (it was Galton who identified and named the 'anticyclone'), and to the wider public as an explorer of southern Afr...

IAN HACKING, The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. x+261. ISBN 0-674-00412-4. £11·50 (paperback). - - Volume 35 Issue 1 - GREGORY RADICK

Pre-natal genetic tests prompt questions about when, if ever, it is legitimate to choose against a potential life. Philip Kitcher has argued that test-based decisions should turn not on whether a potential life would have a disease (understood as dysfunction), but whether that life would be of low quality. I draw attention to difficulties with both...

Evelyn Fox Keller has been observing and reflecting on genetics for decades, first as a molecular biologist, later as a historian, best known for her biography of the corn geneticist and Nobel Prizewinner Barbara McClintock, and as a philosopher of science interested in gender and language. In The Century of the Gene, Keller offers a new interpreta...