The many lives of experiments: Wilhelm Johannsen, selection, hybridization, and the complex relations of genes and characters

Abstract

In addition to his experiments on selection in pure lines, Wilhelm Johannsen (1857-1927) performed less well-known hybridisation experiments with beans. This article describes these experiments and discusses Johannsen's motivations and interpretations, in the context of developments in early genetics. I will show that Johannsen first presented the hybridisation experiments as an additional control for his selection experiments. The latter were dedicated to investigating heredity with respect to debates concerning the significance of natural selection of continuous variation for evolution. In the course of the establishment of a Mendelian research program after 1900, the study of heredity gained increasing independence from questions of evolution, and focused more on the modes and mechanisms of heredity. Further to their role as control experiments, Johannsen also saw his hybridisation experiments as contributing to the Mendelian program, by extending the scope of the principles of Mendelian inheritance to quantitative characters. Towards the end of the first decade of genetics, Johannsen revisited his experiments to illustrate the many-many relationship between genes and characters, at a time when that relationship appeared increasingly complex, and the unit-character concept, accordingly, became inadequate. For the philosophy of science, the example shows that experiments can have multiple roles in a research programme, and can be interpreted in the light of questions other than those that motivated the experiments in the first place.

Keywords: History of genetics; Hybridisation; Philosophy of experiment; Selection; Unit-character; Wilhelm Johannsen.