Gregory Radick, <i>Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 630. ISBN 978-0-226-82270-9. $112.50 (cloth).

Radick's central claim is as simple as it is provocative: the ways the world talks about genesas straightforward determiners of traitshas nothing to do with the reality of genes; it is the result of William Bateson having out-talked Walter Raphael Weldon.His case is supported by exhaustive detail.The first-two thirds of this substantial book are taken up with a detailed chronology of the Weldon-Bateson debate, of which every nuance is explained with admirable clarity.Those who have paid any attention to the history of this dispute will find that many of their preconceptions need amending.Weldon's key objection was to Bateson's conception of dominance, which he regarded as fatally oversimplified.The canonical examples of Mendelian dominance, such as brown eye colour being dominant over blue, are simply untrue.Eye colour comes in numerous shades that blur into one another, fewif anyof which result from a simple pair of dominant/recessive alleles.These exceptions multiplied in the early decades of the twentieth century and have been proliferating ever since, to the point where it is widely recognized that cases exemplifying 'classic' Mendelian simplicity are very much the exception.Yet genetics is still taught as if complexity (multifactorial inheritance, variability, partial dominance and so on), is rare and it is thus only taught to advanced students.This is because Bateson's view triumphed, creating what Radick regards as the key problem with popular understandings of genetics, from the early twentieth century until today.Most of the public knows only what Radick calls Bateson's 'cut-to-the-chase simplicity'that genes determine characters.Weldon, by contrast, emphasized contextthe array of genetic, ancestral and environmental factors that led to him to stress that genes explain the variable differences between traits, and thus organisms.Radick provides detailed analysis of Weldon's unfinished unpublished book, which would have offered a comprehensive account of his ideas, arguing that many Weldonian ideas are now widely accepted by the genetics community.The history of genetics came so close to turning out differently: Radick argues that Weldon had Bateson on the ropes by 1905.Weldon's untimely death from pneumonia left Bateson in a position to shape genetics in his own imagewith disastrous consequences.Radick does not blame Bateson for the evils that have flowed from genetic determinism, but he argues that without Bateson's triumph these evils might have at least been mitigated.One of the book's most imaginative aspects is the attempt to use counterfactual history to establish that Weldon's version of genetics could have triumphed.Radick taught an undergraduate genetics course written as if Weldon had won the argument.Evaluations