[VadeRetro]

He was actually the one who told me about the problem with Mendelian genetics from a Darwinian point of view.

Curious to see exactly what this problem is, I searched back to post 122. I can see why people have no problem with it. It's fine as history. It doesn't work quite so well as an exposition of a problem. In particular, what's the problem?

Darwin knew nothing of genetics. (We might add that Mendel knew nothing of evolution.) The "Neo-Darwinian Synthesis" of genetics and classical evolution only occurred in mid-20th century, yes. As you note, there have been exciting advances since then. There is certainly still work to be done in identifying the fine genetic details of the speciation process. Is that the problem?

[megatherium]

My lengthy post 122 was in response to the question as to whether anyone would be able to explain the molecular basis of evolution. I thought it might be helpful to explain things a bit, and I thought it would be interesting to mention the Mendel/Darwin issue from the early 20th century.

There certainly is work to be done on the problem of speciation. My colleague I mentioned works on certain issues in the problem of speciation: he studies sympatric speciation, where new species form in the same ecological system from a parent species. (This is therefore different than allopatric speciation, where a species finds itself occupying different ecological systems, and speciation occurs when one of the ecological systems changes over time and the population in that system changes with it. If I'm not garbling this. What's interesting is that there are few examples of sympatric evolution.)

[tallhappy]

Darwin knew nothing of genetics. (We might add that Mendel knew nothing of evolution.)

No.

Mendel, in fact, sent a reprint of his paper to Darwin.

Back then manuscripts came from the printer uncut. To read them one had to slice open the pages.

Darwin's copy of the manuscript Mendel sent him was found uncut.

Darwin never even bothered to open Mendel's manuscript.