When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. The battle lines were drawn in England in the late 19th century by William Bateson, who believed in fixed genetic inheritance, and W.F.R. Weldon, who argued that Mendel’s experiments revealed far more variation than Bateson and his supporters acknowledged. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years, and consider why the history of science has a tendency to track such controversies in antagonistic terms, often to the detriment of the science itself.

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On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white squares of the ‘reckoning cloth’ to logarithmic calculating machines, as described in a new book by Jessica Marie Otis. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals in this ‘quantitative transformation’ and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.

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In the latest issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding reviews How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa’s great anglophone satirists. Jeremy joins Tom to talk about Wainaina’s life and work, including the title essay and his ambivalent response to its popularity (‘I went viral,’ he later said, ‘I became spam’); his reporting from South Sudan; the ‘lost chapter’ from his memoir in which he imagines coming out to his parents; and his account of travelling to Senegal to interview the musician Youssou N'Dour, a piece that Harding describes as both ‘beautifully done’ and ‘extremely funny’.

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