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SUMMARY:Revisiting the Mendelian revolution - Staffan Müller-Wille (Unive
 rsity of Exeter)
DTSTART:20120119T163000Z
DTEND:20120119T180000Z
UID:TALK33106@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Nick Hopwood
DESCRIPTION:Much research into heredity in the late nineteenth and early t
 wentieth centuries took place in such applied contexts as seed production\
 , breeding yeast and cereals for large-scale beer making\, mass-manufactur
 e of vaccines\, efforts to further public health\, administration of psych
 iatric hospitals and eugenic programmes. In these areas increasing divisio
 n of labour and more bureaucratic control promoted a culture of expertise 
 and scientificity. We need to understand this if we want to explain the ef
 fect on the life sciences of the so-called rediscovery of Mendel's laws in
  1900. Mendelism was not taken up as a theory\, but as a set of important 
 methods for realizing scientific values such as analyticity\, exactitude\,
  calculability and predictability. Breeders and eugenicists\, in particula
 r\, shared a combinatorial approach that promised the transparent and reli
 able production of effects from one generation to the next. Synthetic chem
 istry\, not physics\, provided the model science. Framed in this way\, the
  origin of genetics appears as much less of a revolutionary break. The con
 cepts and procedures of early Mendelians fitted rather well into a world t
 hat had already been thoroughly shaped by medical and agro-industrial conc
 erns with the production of stable varieties.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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