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William Bateson




William Bateson ( August 8 1861February 8 1926 ) was a British Geneticist . He was the first person to use the term Genetics to describe the study of heredity and inheritance.


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.

William Bateson was the first to suggest the word "genetics" (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation in a personal letter to Adam Sedgwick , dated April 18 , 1905 . Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Genetics (London, England) 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 Gene s were discovered.

Bateson co-discovered Genetic Linkage with Reginald Punnett , and he and Punnett founded the '' Journal Of Genetics '' in 1910 .

His son was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson .


REFERENCES


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



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