In the latter part of the eighteenth century William Bateson (1894) asserted as a central tenet that ‘Variation, in fact, is evolution’. By conflating the then novel science of genetics with established studies of biological variation – notably those of John Stevens Henslow (the first director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden and likely ‘the father of variation’) and his better-known student, Charles Darwin, as well as those of Alfred Wallace – Bateson argued that variation, whatever its source, is a central driver of evolution and for biological evolution genetics – and hence DNA – plays a major role.