The Organization of Scientific Knowledge - About Inheritance, For Example

In the sciences, bodies of knowledge worthy of the name are not merely aggregations. They are organized, with some phenomena and practices treated as exemplary, primary, central and others as exceptional, secondary, peripheral. My book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (2023) concerns the organization of scientific knowledge about biological inheritance, in particular the Mendelian organization which took shape after the 1900 “rediscovery” of Mendel and which persists to this day. Drawing on perspectives from the history of science, the philosophy of science and the sciences themselves, I argue that this organization – and the genetic determinism it engenders – was not inevitable, and furthermore that a better history of how and why biology went Mendelian holds the key to developing an alternative, anti-deterministic organization. In this talk I want to position this work within several long-run STS traditions, along the way touching on the prospects for new kinds of collaboration between STS scholars and discipline-based education researchers (DBER), in biology and beyond.

Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His previous books include The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007), awarded the 2010 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize from the History of Science Society, and, as co-author, Darwin’s Argument by Analogy: From Artificial to Natural Selection (2021). He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Trustee of the Science Museum, and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science (2014-16) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (2019-21). In 2025 he became the first humanities scholar to win the J. B. S. Haldane Lecture Award from the Genetics Society.