"In 1899, almost no one had heard of Gregor Mendel. Yet within ten years, he had entered the scientific pantheon as the father of a powerful new science of heredity-genetics. How did that happen? As Greg Radick explains, that change of fortune was the outcome of one of the most ferocious debates in the whole of the history of science. On one side were the Mendelians, led by the Cambridge biologist William Bateson and his allies, and on the other were their critics, led by Bateson's former friend and teacher, the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon. Weldon's untimely death in 1906, before he could finish a book setting out his alternative vision, is what Radick argues sealed the Mendelian victory. For ever since, Mendelian ideas have served as the standard point of entry for students learning about genetics. We can see this today--in the age of genomics and epigenetics--when biology textbooks privilege Mendel's experiments with pea plants as laying the foundation for all that followed. The message is plain: the twenty-first century owes an enlightened understanding of how biological inheritance really works to the persistence of an intellectual inheritance that took shape in Mendel's garden in the mid-nineteenth century. Disputed Inheritance turns that message on its head. Through a detailed re-examination of the Bateson-Weldon debate, based on a more comprehensive study of unpublished correspondence and manuscripts than previously attempted, Radick reveals how the triumph of Mendelism, with its relentless emphasis on transmitted factors (or "genes," as they came to be called) as the determiners of bodies and minds, in many ways represented a surprising and even backwards step for biology in the early twentieth century"--