There is a large literature touching on Pearson in this area—and the following is only a selection. Pearson’s work has not only attracted attention from regular historians of science but from students of the sociology of scientific knowledge (see above) and the philosophy of science.
Pearson’s biology is put in various historical contexts by
P. J. Bowler (1989) The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society, London: Athlone Press.
W. B. Provine (1971) The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Chicago: University Press.
K.-M. Kim (1994) Explaining Scientific Consensus: the Case of Mendelian Genetics, New York: Guilford Press
J. Gayon (1998) Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
P. R. Sloan (2005/8) Evolution in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Bowler is very brief. The other works have much more to say.
For a recent detailed account of Pearson’s efforts see
M. E. Magnello (1998c) Karl Pearson’s Mathematisation of Inheritance: from Galton’s Ancestral Heredity to Mendelian Genetics (1895-1909), Annals of Science, 55, 35-94.
The controversy with the Mendelian, William Bateson, is examined more specifically in
P. Froggatt & N. C. Nevin (1971) The “Law of Ancestral Heredity” and the Mendelian-Ancestrian Controversy in England 1889-1906, Journal of Medical Genetics, 8, 1-36.
D. A. MacKenzie & B. Barnes (1979) Scientific Judgement: the Biometry-Mendelism Controversy, pp. 191-210 of Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, edited by B. Barnes and S. Shapin, Beverly-Hills: Sage.
N. Roll-Hansen (1983): The Death of Spontaneous Generation and the Birth of the Gene: Two Case Studies of Relativism. Social Studies of Science, 13, 481-519.
R. Olby (1988) The Dimensions of Scientific Controversy: The Biometric-Mendelian Debate, British Journal of the History of Science, 22, 299-320.
A. Nordmann (1992) Darwinians at War: Bateson’s Place in Histories of Darwinism, Synthese, 91, 53-72.
A. R. Rushton (2000) Nettleship, Pearson and Bateson: The Biometric-Mendelian Debate in a Medical Context, Journal of the History of Medicine, 55, 134-157.
M. E. Magnello (2004) “The Reception of Mendelism by the Biometricians and the Early Mendelians (1899-1909, in M. Keynes, A. W. F. Edwards, R. Peel (eds.) (2004) A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics, London: Taylor & Francis.
Olby also reviews the secondary literature. For Bateson see Donald Forsdyke’s website. A major biography of Bateson has recently appeared
Alan G. Cock & Donald R. Forsdyke “Treasure Your Exceptions”: The Science and Life of William Bateson, Springer (June 2008) Amazon
An important point of contention between Pearson and Fisher (see also the references under Statistics above) is treated by
B. Norton and E. S. Pearson (1976) A Note on the Background to and Refereeing of R. A. Fisher’s 1918 Paper ‘The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian inheritance’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London, 31, 151-62. JSTOR
Fisher 1918 reconciled Mendelism and Biometry. Morrison tries to identify the assumptions behind Fisher’s reconciliation and Pearson’s rejection of reconciliation.
M. Morrison (2002) Modelling Populations: Pearson and Fisher on Mendelism and Biometry, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 53, 39-698.
Pearson’s criticism of some Mendelian work on the inheritance of mental defect is treated by
H. G. Spencer and D. B. Paul (1998) The Failure of a Scientific Critic: David Heron, Karl Pearson and Mendelian Eugenics, British Journal of the History of Science, 31, 441-452.
