In Pursuit of the Gene

X-RAYS © 229
Bateson’s plenary address to the members of the AAAS in the grand
Convocation Hall of the University of Toronto was the main event in the
medley of biological meetings held in Toronto during Christmas week of
1921. Misrepresented by reporters, Bateson’s address would be picked up by
all the news media and used as a propaganda tool for William Jennings
Bryan in his campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in the United
States. The religious overtones in the title of his lecture, “Evolution Faith
and Modern Doubts,” and the lecture’s being packed with biblical allusions,
which were a staple of Bateson’s lecture style, made him a ripe target for
the sensationalist press. Sensing the danger, Bateson had included an unambiguous
rejoinder to those who might be tempted to misinterpret his
lecture: “Let us then proclaim in precise and unmistakable language that
our faith in evolution is unshaken.”
The talk itself, as Bateson recognized, had an antiquarian air about
it, harkening back to arguments that Darwin himself had made sixty years
earlier. Nostalgically Bateson recalled his first visit to America in 1888 when
evolution had been the burning issue for any serious biologist. In that
era, he recalled for the assembled crowd of scientists and journalists, “every
aspiring zoologist was a embryologist” because embryology was then believed
to hold the key to understanding evolution. By the turn of the century,
Bateson continued, the old Haeckelian ideas had proved to be a dead
end, and he and other evolution-minded biologists turned to the study of
“variation and heredity,” creating the discipline that Bateson himself had
dubbed genetics in 1905. “We became geneticists in the conviction that there
at least must evolutionary wisdom be found,” 30 he explained, but genetics,
like embryology before it, had failed to deliver on the promise. Even with
the advances of Mendelism and the further additions provided by the
Drosophila workers at Columbia, biologists were no closer to understanding
the “mode and processes of evolution” and to finally resolving the mystery
of the origin of species.
The following day, Bateson gave another lecture, this one to the Society
of Zoologists, which spelled out the nature of his conversion to the
chromosome theory and elaborated on his various reservations. On the
larger point—that genes resided in chromosomes—he did finally join the