August 8, 1861

William Bateson, (August 8, 1861 to February 8, 1926) was a British biologist, remembered today for his championship of Gregor Mendel and his own contributions to experimental biology.

His book, Materials for the Study of Variation (1894), challenged the standard view of British biologists, that embryos recapitulate the history of their species, and he remained, though famous, somewhat outside the academic mainstream.

One support Bateson enjoyed was that of John Hopkins professor , W. K. Brooks. Brooks

..."stressed the inadequacy of natural selection acting on purely fortuitous small variations." Bateson's "...research with the devoted circle of supporters around him in Cambridge led to the discovery of [the]... linkage..., of the interactions known as epistasis and hypostasis between hereditary determinants, of the Mendelian character of sex limited inheritance differences ....and [Bateson]"...coined the word 'genetics', [itself] defining it as the elucidation of the phenomena of heredity and variation...

Here is how the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, from whom all the above quotes come, summarizes Bateson's significance:

Bateson is a striking example of the trend from descriptive to experimental tradition in biology which took place about the beginning of the twentieth century....Meanwhile Bateson had risen to a position of world fame despite his sceptical attitude to Darwinian evolution. In 1922 he accepted the request to become a trustee of the British Museum, but he declined the offer of a knighthood.

And we will conclude with a quote from William Bateson himself, in the book mentioned above -- Materials for the study of variation: treated with especial regard to discontinuity in the origin of species (1894.)

...[Regarding] Colour-patterns... Thus far I have spoken only of discontinuous variations in colours themselves, but there are no less remarkable instances of discontinuous variations in the distribution of colours in particoloured forms. By a combination of these modes, variations of great magnitude may occur.

One of the most obvious cases of this phenomenon is that of the Cat. In European towns cats are of many colours, but they nevertheless fall very readily into certain classes. The chief of these are black, tabby, silver-grey and silver-brindled, sandy, tortoiseshell, black and white, and white. Of course no two cats have identical colouring, but the individual variations group very easily round these centres, and intermediate forms which cannot at once be referred to any of these groups are immediately recognized as something out of the common and strange. Yet it is almost certain that cats of all shades breed freely together, and there is no reason to suppose that the discontinuity between the colour groups is in any way determined by Natural Selection.

Bateson is saying that the colors of cats cannot be fully explained by Darwin's ideas about natural selection.