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Notes
Interestingly, in some places the view of estate-owners as ‘progressive’ and peasants as backward has varied over time. In Sarah Wilmot’s study of the British literature on ‘science and agriculture’, for example, she demonstrates that although this view predominated in the late 18th and early nineteenth century, by the mid-nineteenth century writers had become critical of landlords, not only for failing to apply ‘science’, but also for restricting their tenants’ ability to experiment (Wilmot 1990).
Elsewhere I have argued that such pressure is one of the reasons why teaching and research at some agricultural colleges in Germany has been much more strongly oriented toward the natural sciences while at others it has maintained a strong practical-orientation (Harwood 2005).
Even with an analogy which is heuristically fruitful, of course, not all aspects of it are necessarily helpful. In this case it seems to me that we don’t learn very much about farmers’ behaviour by drawing an analogy between them and doctors.
The impact of Mendelism upon commercial breeding is much harder to establish, but the indirect evidence available so far suggests that it was slight (Harwood 2015).
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Harwood, J. Comments on Experimentation in Twentieth-Century Agricultural Science. HPLS 37, 326–330 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-015-0074-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-015-0074-x