Magnello M E
The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, UK.
Ann Sci. 1998 Jan;55(1):35-94. doi: 10.1080/00033799800200111.
Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he 'accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel' as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. Moreover, in 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were 'too good to be true', Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue.
在整个二十世纪，长期以来一直有人声称生物统计学家卡尔·皮尔逊及其同事W. F. R. 韦尔登拒绝接受孟德尔遗传学作为一种遗传理论。事实表明，在十九世纪末，皮尔逊考虑了各种遗传理论（包括弗朗西斯·高尔顿关于由连续变异支撑的性状的祖先遗传定律），到1904年，他“接受了孟德尔的基本思想”，将其作为不连续变异的遗传理论。此外，在1909年，他提出了生物统计学与孟德尔遗传学的综合。尽管许多遗传学家（包括1936年的R. A. 费希尔）多次尝试对孟德尔的数据使用皮尔逊卡方（X²，P）拟合优度检验，得出的结果“好得令人难以置信”，但韦尔登在1902年也得出了相同的结论，不过他的结果从未得到认可。相反，生物统计学家的遗传学对手威廉·贝特森对这项工作极为批评，并将此解释为韦尔登对孟德尔遗传学的拒绝。虽然在过去18年里，科学史学家对孟德尔的研究已形成了对孟德尔的平衡观点，但有人认为，早就应该对皮尔逊、韦尔登以及生物统计学家们在遗传统计学方面的工作形成更平衡、更全面的看法了。
