He covers mathematics, experience, and argument in 19th-century science; mathematical arguments in The Origin of Species; Mendel, mathematics, and the case for uniform particulate inheritance; rhetorical strategies and Francis Galton's arguments for a mathematical model of inheritance; Karl Pearson and the push for theoretical mathematical biology; and the ethos of biometry.
Only after his death would scientists found the new discipline of genetics on Gregor Mendel's theory of particulate inheritance. Similarly, the science of biology is a twentieth-century construct.