In Pursuit of the Gene

REDISCOVERY © 117
tance and later applied to basset hound coat color, Bateson acknowledged,
the law seemed to work remarkably well. However, Pearson had given
Galton’s law a major overhaul in 1898, so that it now allowed for the effects
of natural selection to alter the mean of a character as it was passed down
the generations. In his paper, Pearson downplayed the significance of this
change, which was very much at odds with Galton’s views on the discontinuity
of evolution. Instead, he emphasized the fact that the modified law
still applied to discrete or “alternate” inheritance, as exemplified by the case
of tricolor or “lemon and white” coat color in basset hounds that Galton
had first studied, as well as to continuous characters like human stature.
“On the whole,” Pearson had written, “the confirmation obtained from
stature data for the law of ancestral heredity is very striking; I am inclined
to think even more convincing than obtainable from the basset hounds.” 32
On January 1, 1900, Pearson published a revision of the already revised ancestral
law of inheritance, which was, like the first paper on the same subject,
dedicated to Galton. In his new paper Pearson backtracked, claiming
that his 1898 law had applied only to the case of blending inheritance but
not to the discrete case. 33
Although mathematics had always been his weakest subject, Bateson
did not fail to appreciate that there was something soft about Pearson’s socalled
hard mathematical analysis, pointing out that it was the discrete case
of coat color inheritance that the ancestral law had so wonderfully explained
in the first place. 34 While he had allowed that the law might still apply
in cases of Mendelian inheritance, 35 Bateson could not resist satirizing
Pearson’s equivocations, writing: “The Law of Ancestral Heredity after the
glorious launch in 1898 has been brought home for a complete refit. The
top-hamper is cut down and the vessel altogether more manageable; indeed
she looks trimmed for most weathers.” 36
Later that year, Pearson’s brilliant disciple G. Udny Yule pointed out
that there was no fundamental contradiction between the two points of
view. While strictly speaking it was true that it was only the particular structural
characters, or genes, as they would soon be known, possessed by the parents
that could affect the offspring, it was also true that an individual’s ancestry
provided the best estimate of that individual’s genetic composition.
Yule’s insight fell on deaf ears. 37