Posted at 2016.06.05 Category : Nature
小保方さんに功績があるとすれば我々一般人に科学には検証が必要なことを改めて教えてくれてことでしょうか。現在オーソドックスな理論として教えられているものを当時の検証過程にさかのぼることでもう一度その意義を考えることの重要性を先月のNatureで取り上げてくれていました。15分40秒あたりから今回取り上げる話題が始まります。
こちらがEditorialです。もしダーウィンがいなかったらというDarwin Deletedという本は数年前に出たそうですが今回は別の歴史家が遺伝におけるメンデルの役割を見直します。nature always trumps nurtureというのは遺伝が環境よりも影響が大きいことを指しているのでしょう。nature or nurture（生まれか育ちか）は語感がいいのでペアでよく使われます。
Second thoughts
Revisiting the past can help to inform ideas of the present.
17 May 2016
What if Darwin had toppled overboard before he joined the evolutionary dots? That discussion seems useful, because it raises interesting questions about the state of knowledge, then and now, and how it is communicated and portrayed. In his 2013 book Darwin Deleted — in which the young Charles is, indeed, lost in a storm — the historian Peter Bowler argued that the theory of evolution would have emerged just so, but with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order, and therefore less antagonistic to religious society.
In this week’s World View, another historian offers an alternative pathway for science: what if the ideas of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of traits had been challenged more robustly and more successfully by a rival interpretation by the scientist W. F. R. Weldon? Gregory Radick argues that a twentieth-century genetics driven more by Weldon’s emphasis on environmental context would have weakened the dominance of the current misleading impression that nature always trumps nurture.
Editorialの途中でIf the past is a foreign countryという見慣れない表現が使われていました。こういうのがあればその分野でよく言われていることや、有名な引用であるケースが多いですね。
Biologists may take issue with the methods, but the results seem less important than the fact that such an experiment could be performed at all. If the past is a foreign country, then it is also supposed to be one that cannot be revisited.
今回はL. P. Hartleyという作家の引用でした。
The Go-Between (1953)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
つい忘れてしまいがちですが通説というのは様々な検証を経たものなんですよね。
These ‘winners’ became dominant before all the criticisms against them were fully answered, which raises questions about why the debates went the way they did, and whether they could have gone otherwise — and if so, with what repercussions.
A well-informed interest in alternative scientific pasts can help us to take the actual past more seriously as a source of present-day insight. It can also help us to stay self-critical as we make choices in the present. Science without consensus would be chaos. But the price of consensus is eternal vigilance against complacency, and a willingness to contemplate the road otherwise not travelled.
こちらが投稿されたものです。指摘の通り遺伝子を決定論のように捉えがちですから、環境の重要性を見直すことも重要かもしれません。
Teach students the biology of their time
An experiment in genetics education reveals how Mendel’s legacy holds back the teaching of science, says Gregory Radick.
17 May 2016
Take genetics. The past year has seen prolonged celebrations of the work of Gregor Mendel, linked to the 150th anniversary of the paper that reported his experiments with hybrid peas. Mendel’s experiments are central to biology curricula across the world. By contrast, the criticisms levelled at Mendel’s ideas by W. F. R. Weldon, Linacre professor at the University of Oxford, UK, are a footnote.
From 1902, Weldon’s views brought him into increasingly bad-tempered conflict with Mendel’s followers. In basic terms, the Mendelians believed that inherited factors (later called ‘genes’) determine the visible characters of an organism, whereas Weldon saw context — developmental and environmental — as being just as important, with its influence making characters variable in ways that Mendelians ignored. The Mendelians won — helped by Weldon’s sudden death in 1906, before he published his ideas fully — and the teaching of genetics has emphasized the primacy of the gene ever since.
The problem is that the Mendelian ‘genes for’ approach is increasingly seen as out of step with twenty-first-century biology. If we are to realize the potential of the genomic age, critics say, we must find new concepts and language better matched to variablebiological reality. This is important in education, where the reliance on simple examples may even promote an outmoded determinism
こちらがEditorialです。もしダーウィンがいなかったらというDarwin Deletedという本は数年前に出たそうですが今回は別の歴史家が遺伝におけるメンデルの役割を見直します。nature always trumps nurtureというのは遺伝が環境よりも影響が大きいことを指しているのでしょう。nature or nurture（生まれか育ちか）は語感がいいのでペアでよく使われます。
Second thoughts
Revisiting the past can help to inform ideas of the present.
17 May 2016
What if Darwin had toppled overboard before he joined the evolutionary dots? That discussion seems useful, because it raises interesting questions about the state of knowledge, then and now, and how it is communicated and portrayed. In his 2013 book Darwin Deleted — in which the young Charles is, indeed, lost in a storm — the historian Peter Bowler argued that the theory of evolution would have emerged just so, but with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order, and therefore less antagonistic to religious society.
In this week’s World View, another historian offers an alternative pathway for science: what if the ideas of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of traits had been challenged more robustly and more successfully by a rival interpretation by the scientist W. F. R. Weldon? Gregory Radick argues that a twentieth-century genetics driven more by Weldon’s emphasis on environmental context would have weakened the dominance of the current misleading impression that nature always trumps nurture.
Editorialの途中でIf the past is a foreign countryという見慣れない表現が使われていました。こういうのがあればその分野でよく言われていることや、有名な引用であるケースが多いですね。
Biologists may take issue with the methods, but the results seem less important than the fact that such an experiment could be performed at all. If the past is a foreign country, then it is also supposed to be one that cannot be revisited.
今回はL. P. Hartleyという作家の引用でした。
The Go-Between (1953)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
つい忘れてしまいがちですが通説というのは様々な検証を経たものなんですよね。
These ‘winners’ became dominant before all the criticisms against them were fully answered, which raises questions about why the debates went the way they did, and whether they could have gone otherwise — and if so, with what repercussions.
A well-informed interest in alternative scientific pasts can help us to take the actual past more seriously as a source of present-day insight. It can also help us to stay self-critical as we make choices in the present. Science without consensus would be chaos. But the price of consensus is eternal vigilance against complacency, and a willingness to contemplate the road otherwise not travelled.
こちらが投稿されたものです。指摘の通り遺伝子を決定論のように捉えがちですから、環境の重要性を見直すことも重要かもしれません。
Teach students the biology of their time
An experiment in genetics education reveals how Mendel’s legacy holds back the teaching of science, says Gregory Radick.
17 May 2016
Take genetics. The past year has seen prolonged celebrations of the work of Gregor Mendel, linked to the 150th anniversary of the paper that reported his experiments with hybrid peas. Mendel’s experiments are central to biology curricula across the world. By contrast, the criticisms levelled at Mendel’s ideas by W. F. R. Weldon, Linacre professor at the University of Oxford, UK, are a footnote.
From 1902, Weldon’s views brought him into increasingly bad-tempered conflict with Mendel’s followers. In basic terms, the Mendelians believed that inherited factors (later called ‘genes’) determine the visible characters of an organism, whereas Weldon saw context — developmental and environmental — as being just as important, with its influence making characters variable in ways that Mendelians ignored. The Mendelians won — helped by Weldon’s sudden death in 1906, before he published his ideas fully — and the teaching of genetics has emphasized the primacy of the gene ever since.
The problem is that the Mendelian ‘genes for’ approach is increasingly seen as out of step with twenty-first-century biology. If we are to realize the potential of the genomic age, critics say, we must find new concepts and language better matched to variablebiological reality. This is important in education, where the reliance on simple examples may even promote an outmoded determinism
