William Bateson (August 8 1861—February 8 1926) was a British geneticist. He was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity and inheritence.

Biography

Bateson was born in Whitby, educated at Rugby School and St John's College, Cambridge, he popularised the work of Gregor Mendel in the English-speaking world. Bateson became involved in a bitter dispute with the biometricians led by his former teacher Walter Frank Raphael Weldon and by Karl Pearson. The biometricians doubted the generality of Mendel's account of heredity and also believed that evolution proceeded continuously rather than by jumps. These differences were resolved with the modern evolutionary synthesis. See Provine.

Bateson was the first to name research on heredity with "genetics" from the Greek word "genetikos" (the produced) in 1906, three years before Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "gene" for the units of hereditary information. Thus the phenomenon of phenotype was investigated earlier than genes were discovered.

Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

References

• W. B. Provine (1971) The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. University of Chicago Press.

External links

• BBC site
• Punnett and Bateson
• Several documents by, or about, Bateson are on Donald Forsdyke's webpages, e.g. Opposition to Bateson