410 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
In fact, Bateson's later career did not follow this happy scenario at all. Instead,
he walked the all too common ontogenetic trajectory from young Turk to old
fogey. He did rejoice in the potentially Mendelian character of discontinuity, but
he altered none of his earlier views and became, in the eyes of most younger
contemporaries, an increasingly dyspeptic and conservative force (Arthur
Koestler's characterization of Bateson, as a vitriolic opponent in the sad case of the
Neo-Lamarckian Paul Kammerer, paints a colorful, though not entirely fair,
portrait of Bateson's later career—see Koestler, 1971). Bateson continued his
hostility to Darwinian and all other forms of functionalist explanation (hence his
brutal opposition to Kammerer and other Lamarckians). Above all, the new
genetics eventually ran away from him, primarily because he would not budge
from his old, controlling belief in physical causation of phenotypic discontinuity
by underlying wave-like or vibratory motions. Bateson took this idea so literally
that he could never accept the "materialistic" chromosomal account of inheritance.
Thus, he continued to insist, following his beloved "vibratory" theory, that
transmission of hereditary information, while obeying the Mendelian rules of
course, must be promulgated by force and motion, rather than by discrete particles.
Bateson delivered the Silliman lectures at Yale University in 1907 and, after
considerable delay, published the text as Problems of Genetics in 1913, his major
post-Mendelian statement on heredity and evolution. His views had changed very
little from the themes and claims discussed in Materials in 1894. He rejoices in the
Mendelian discovery, and gives a good account of early work, while focusing on
the limits for evolutionary theory—particularly on his old problem of explaining
meristic discontinuity, and his hope for a mechanical explanation based on waves
and energy. "In Mendelian analysis we have now, it is true, something comparable
with the clue of chemistry, but there is still little prospect of penetrating the
obscurity which envelops the mechanical aspect of our phenomena" (1913, p. 32).
But if we cannot yet fathom meristic variation, at least we may infer that
inheritance must be vibratory, not particulate. Ironically, then, Bateson commits
his greatest error in thinking about his favorite phenomenon—for he never
suspected the integrating theme that particles might code for substances controlling
rates of processes:
When however we pass from the substantive to the meristic characters, the
conception that the character depends on the possession by the germ of a
particle of a specific material becomes even less plausible. Hardly by any
effort of imagination can we see any way by which the division of the
vertebral column into x segments or into y segments, or of a Medusa into
four segments or into six, can be determined by the possession or by the
want of a material particle. The distinction must surely be of a different
order. If we are to look for a physical analogy at all we should rather be led
to suppose that these differences in segmental numbers correspond with
changes in the amplitude or number of dividing waves than with any
change in the substance or material divided (1913, p. 35).