Knowledge is power : Hugo de Vries on science, heredity and social progress / Bert Theunissen.
Abstract:
'Here, my aim is not to go further into de Vries' role in the history of Mendelism or the history of the evolutionary synthesis, but to reconstruct the cultural and social context within which de Vries' views of heredity and evolution took shape. For as I shall try to show, it is only against this background that we can fully appreciate how and why he developed his particular views, while such an approach may also help us to gain a better understanding of the tremendous popularity of the mutation theory in the first decades of the twentieth century.'
British journal for the history of science Vol. 27 (1994), p. 291-311