With all the hoopla over Darwin Day (justified in my opinion) I thought I'd point you to this article, Gregor Mendel: The father of genetics. The contemporaneous insights of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel illustrate the beauty of science, nature's gift to us in its underlying unity of form. Darwin looked at the big picture and saw the compelling connection between biological variation across space and time and natural selection. Mendel's experiments elucidated the most atomic and elementary reactions which buttressed the grand arcs of natural history and the flow of selection. Though the underlying unity eluded the first generation of evolutionary biologists after Darwin and Mendel the inevitable reconciliation between genetics and Darwinian evolution was forged by R.A. Fisher in 1918 (here is the paper that did it). Because of the majestic scope of Darwin's ideas he precedes Mendel in the scientific chain of being, but just as great strategicists need the aid of tacticians, evolutionary biology as a discipline would not exist without the insights of Gregor Mendel.1
1 - Mendelian genetics was an inevitable discovery, as the nearly simultaneous rediscovery of "Mendel's Laws" around 1900 show us. But so what? Newtonian Mechanics was probably inevitable (assuming a scientific culture as we know it), but Isaac Newton was first and foremost. The magnitude of Mendel's discovery was relatively modest compared to that of Newton's, but the vector is the same.
Comments
Mendel was a sort of archaic survival of the old days when the scholars of the world were mostly monks. His education was sketchy though he spent two years in Vienna. I've read that he was a rather difficult, neurotic personality and not unusually devout.
At one point he was encouraged to work on hawkweed, whose genetics are complicated. I've read that Darwin also worked on hawkweed and failed, and perhaps that's why Mendel was encouraged to try. His results weren't good either.
It seems likely to me that if Darwin had started out with a simple aAbB type plant like peas he would have been the father of genetics too.
Mendel
Posted by: John Emerson | February 17, 2006 12:45 PM
I've read that he was a rather difficult, neurotic personality and not unusually devout.
yes, i've read the same thing. his clerical vocation was a function of familial circumstances, not a personal calling.
in regards to the selection of an organism to test a thesis on, mendel was lucky, and he fudged the numbers quite a bit. luck matters in science. i just talked to a guy who i vaguely knew as an undergrad who happens to be working in a guy who won the nobel last year, so he is getting a lot of plum post-doc offers. he's smart, but not that smart, he just picked the right lab (yes, he had to be smart to get into the lab he got into, but i have friends as smart or smarter who picked a different lab and where things didn't work out for a variety of reasons).
Posted by: razib
| February 17, 2006 12:50 PM
"In regards to the selection of an organism to test a thesis on, mendel was lucky, and he fudged the numbers quite a bit."
That's quite an understatement. IIRC, he would have had a 1/10,000 chance of getting numbers as elegant as he did just by chance.
Posted by: Urinated State of America | February 17, 2006 1:07 PM
give him a break, he wrote before conjectures and refutations was published! :)
Posted by: razib
| February 17, 2006 1:14 PM
Great page! I am preparing a "fictional" talk on: what if Mendel met Darwin when he went to London? Any good links to this idea?
Cheers
Manuel
Posted by: Manuel Mota | April 25, 2006 10:55 AM