How a Monk and His Peas Changed the World

Yahoo News ^ | Mon Jul 28 | Heather Whipps

[Soliton]

Working in the solitude of an Austrian monastery, one 19th-century holy man managed to unravel the basic principles of heredity with just a handful of pea species that he bred and crossbred, counted and catalogued with monastic discipline.

While plant and animal genes were Gregor Mendel's original focus, his ideas later made sense of our complex human workings, too, kicking off the scientific discipline of genetics.

An unconventional scientist

Today, Mendel is revered as the father of genetics, but the Austrian's work on heredity didn't initially make the kind of big splash in the science world achieved, for example, by his contemporary, Charles Darwin.

Mendel wasn't a traditional scientist, however.

Despite working for a time as a primary and secondary school teacher and studying at the University of Vienna, Mendel was first and foremost a full-time monk. Mendel lived at the Augustinian Abbey of Brno (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) from 1843 until his death in 1884, acting as its revered Abbott for more than half of those years.

[Larry Lucido]

[raygunfan]

christians are the best at discovering what God has created....

and the funny thing about those peas...they were peas before mendel, and were peas during mendels life and they stayed peas, down to today...

[count-your-change]

Isn't it peculiar that the humanists, evolutionists, etc. like to trot the old canard that religion opposes science and progress yet Isaac Newton, Leonardo DiVinci, Louis Pasteur did their work in societies where religion held great power.
Yet someone like Semmelweis was driven out of medicine to his death because the learned professional men of his day could not, would not wash their hands.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[raygunfan]

I agree. A world and universe that runs on logical rules had to have a logical mind, and that is what christian men of science have always done, studied the great creation that God has given us.