Abstract
Science textbooks and classes mostly emphasize what are considered by today’s standards the “right” or “correct” interpretations of particular phenomena or processes. When “incorrect” ideas of the past are mentioned at all, it is simply to point out their errors, with little attention as to why the ideas were put forward in the first place, or ever gained a following. A strong case can be made, however, for presenting contrasting or even what are considered today “wrong” hypotheses as a way of not only emphasizing the dynamic nature of science (which is punctuated throughout by controversies and contrasting views), but also as a way of helping students better understand the details and workings of contemporary views. This article will illustrate these claims by examining the work of embryologist-turned-geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan in the early decades of the twentieth century.
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Notes
Among historians and philosophers, see Maienschein et al. (2008), Gooday et al. (2008), Rudge and Howe (2009) and Allchin (2001); among scientists and science textbook writers, see Allen and Baker (2001) and Mix et al. (1996). Earlier versions of these ideas can also be found in Allen (1966a, b, 1970). Physicist (and Nobel laureate) James Wilson, has promoted the use of history of science in revising pre-college science curricula.
The issue was resolved in favor of the echinoderms, on he grounds that their larval forms (called a bipinnaria) were extremely similar to the larvae of the hemichordates (called a tornaria), an early ancestor of the entire chordate group. The evidence for this conclusion is still indirect and circumstantial, and none of the various hypotheses could be completely ruled out.
Although by 1900 virtually all embryologists had renounced the earlier eighteenth century doctrine of preformation, it still haunted the field as an old ghost that seemed all too ready to spring back to life if given the opportunity.
Boveri’s experimental determination of the individuality idea was ingenious: By adding high concentrations of sperm to dishes of sea urchin eggs, he was able to produce zygotes that had been doubly-fertilized. In these forms distribution of the chromosomes during mitosis was abnormal, with some blastomeres lacking copies of one or another chromosome pair. Those cells, when isolated and allowed to develop on their own produced varying kinds of abnormalities, depending on which chromosome pair was missing. The regularity of association between a specific physical abnormality in the embryo and the loss of a particular chromosome convinced Boveri that, in his own words, “not a definite number but a definite combination of chromosomes [emphasis in original] is necessary for normal development, and this means nothing other than that the individual chromosomes must possess different qualities” (Boveri 1902, as translated and reprinted in Voeller (1968), p. 93).
At the time it was not clear that Drosophila males has a Y-chromosome; in many groups of insects males are XO, while females are XX, and this was thought to be the situation in Drosophila as well (see Fig. 1 for Morgan’s early representation of his sex-linked crosses in 1913). By 1915 it was clear male Drosophila did in fact have a Y-chromosome and should be represented as XY.
For a more detailed discussion of Bateson’s attraction and repulsion hypothesis, see Moore (1963: pp. 89–92.)
Ironically, one aspect of the Mendelian-chromosome paradigm that Morgan himself never fully seemed to appreciate was that chromosomal variations (translocations, inversions, deletions) and phenomena such as position effect (where the phenotypic expression of a gene or gene complex is altered by its position on the chromosome) were also rich sources of variation in addition to point mutations. That point was emphasized by a later generation of cytologists led by Cyril D. Darlington in Britain, among others (Harman 2004).
These include Walter S. Sutton (1877–1916), a student of E.B. Wilson’s at Columbia. He started work on the cytology of spermatogenesis in the grasshopper, Brachystola magna for his master’s thesis at the University of Kansas, and completed the study while working under Wilson; his significant paper postulating the relationship between Mendelian segregation and meiosis was published in 1903 in the Biological Bulletin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (Vol 4, pp 231–151). Wilson, followjjng Sutton, was noted above as supporting this interpretation.
Morgan was awarded the prize in the fall of 1933, but said he could not attend the official ceremony because of the pressure and timing of his work, so traveled to Stockholm to receive the award in June, 1934. His Nobel speech was reprinted the next year in the Scientific Monthly (Morgan 1935).
Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century a movement founded and propagated by physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), known as empirio-criticism, argued that science should be limited to statements derived from experience (defined by our sensations) and should avoid positing metaphysical entities, such as atoms, whose existence could only be inferred and not observed directly.
In 1929 and 1930 T.S. Painter in the United States, studying the giant salivary gland chromosomes of Drosophila, showed that with proper staining techniques, the fine-structure of the chromosomes could be observed in great detail. While this did not allow for the identification of actual genes, it did allow for the close correlation of genetics maps (based on breeding ratios) with cytological maps (based on observing variations in chromosome structure). For example, if a hybrid cross was expected to show the dominant trait, but shoed the recessive instead, and observation of the respective chromosomes indicated a deletion of a particular segment, the locus for that gene (and its alleles) could be pinpointed to that region.
A number of such institutes were emerging at the time: the prototype was the Naples Zoological Station in Italy (founded 1874–76), followed by the Marine Biological Station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (1888), the numerous laboratories established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (starting in 1902), the Rockefeller Institute (1901), and the many state and United States Department of Agriculture Experiment Stations founded from the 1880s onward. These institutions not only indicated the rising stature of biology but in a very real sense provided increasing opportunities for employment or at least access to research facilities over extended periods of time (see Maienschein 1991: pp. 3–4).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gary Borissy and the organizers of the 2010 T. H. Morgan Symposium at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, for the initial invitation to present this talk honoring the centenary of Morgan’s first paper on Drosophila. In preparing our separate talks for that occasion, I had many stimulating discussions with my good friend and colleague Jane Maienschein, who, as always, helped keep me on track. I also want to thank three anonymous reviews for Science and Education for their critical, but very helpful, comments.
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Allen, G.E. How Many Times Can You Be Wrong and Still Be Right? T. H. Morgan, Evolution, Chromosomes and the Origins of Modern Genetics. Sci & Educ 24, 77–99 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9664-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9664-8