William Bateson

William Bateson (August 8, 1861 – February 8, 1926) was a British geneticist. He was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity and biological inheritance, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. He later became famous as the outspoken Mendelian antagonist of Walter Weldon, his former teacher, and Karl Pearson who led the Biometric school of thinking in the debate over Saltationism verus Gradualism that led up to the Modern evolutionary synthesis.

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.

Bateson authored the 1894 treatise Materials for the study of variation: treated with special regard to discontinuity in the origin of species, in which he catalogued unusual physical variations in animal specimens, and classified each variation as either a deviation from the expected number of a certain body part; or as one in which an expected body part has been replaced by another (which he called homeotic). The animal variations he studied included bees with legs instead of antennae; crayfish with extra oviducts; and in humans, polydactyly, extra ribs, and males with extra nipples. Bateson was the first to suggest the word "genetics" (from the Greek genno, &#947;&#949;&#957;&#957;&#974;; to give birth) to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation in a personal letter to Alan (or Adam) Sedgwick, dated April 18, 1905. Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London in 1906, three years before Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "gene" to describe the units of hereditary information. Thus the phenomenon of phenotype was investigated earlier than genes were discovered.

Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

In his later years he was a friend and confidant of the German Erwin Baur. Their correspondence includes their discussion of eugenics.

His son was the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.