Primer: Drosophila September 3, 2008

What value do historians of science gain from locating a point of origin?  Scientists, I think, like origins, because it’s customary to give credit where credit is due in scientific papers.  Historians can find origins very useful, because they often reveal a certain motivation or meaning in a tradition, which was later lost even as the tradition persisted.  There’s probably a certain satisfaction to be found in looking at some point in history, and finding that “before this point in time, this idea did not exist.”  But there are dangers as well.  Meanings change notoriously over time, so when we look for the origin of this or that belief that we hold today, though we may recognize it in the past, it would look quite different to those who “came up” with it.  Origins are also slippery in other ways.  We often find that when we track them down, some new “predecessor” presents itself, and we’re stuck chasing a constantly retreating mirage.  Thus, when we bother to track things down, we should make sure we gain value from the act of tracking.

In the case of genetics, there’s a well-known tradition that dates the study of genetics back to the monk Gregor Mendel and his famous green and yellow peas (get out your Punnett squares, class).  There’s even a historical scandal suggesting that Mendel cooked his data: statistically it’s too good.  But why should we really care about Mendel?  I mean, it’s good to know about him, and it’s good to know how others have viewed him and used his precedent to further their own work, but there’s not much value in worrying too much about him, specifically.  His work wasn’t used or even known until 35 years after its publication in an obscure journal, when it was unearthed by Hugo DeVries and Carl Correns, who were part of a thriving botanical/laboratory-biology culture circa 1900 that was already deep in theorization about how (more…)