An introduction to a biology : and other papers / by A.D. Darbishire.

  • Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire
Date:
1917
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: An introduction to a biology : and other papers / by A.D. Darbishire. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/322 page VIII
    Preface the position from which he had started upon them. He had begun as a pupil of the Biometrie school with a strong bias against the Mendelian theory. He now worked his way, through difficulty and depression, to a point from which he saw that the contradiction between the two theories was only apparent and was really due to a difference in the point of view from which each party approached the same facts. He defined his position, and cut himself adrift from both schools in his contribution to the debate on heredity at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge in 1904,^ and in two papers contributed to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, On the Supposed An¬ tagonism of Mendelian to Biometrie Theories of Heredity (1905) and On the Difference between Physiological and Statistical Laws of Heredity (1906).2 He maintained this independent and critical attitude all his life, and upon no man's work, whether of description or interpretation, did he keep a closer critical watch than upon his own. One's attitude as an investigator, he wrote, should be one of continual, unceasing and active distrust of oneself. His later experiments with mice, peas, fowls and rabbits were designed to test the Mendelian hypothesis with absolutely no pre¬ judgment of the case. After thirteen years of patient investigation he could write in February, 1915, I consider the Mendelian principles to be still sub judice ; and they are so attractive by reason of their simplicity that they need to be under a very 1 Vide infra, p. 162. « Vide infra, pp. 144 and 167.
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