Posted on 07/20/2022 3:04:46 PM PDT by Borges
On this day 200 years ago, Johann Mendel was born. He would come to be known as Gregor (the religious name he received upon entering St. Thomas's Abbey in Austria-Hungary as an Augustinian Friar) and later as the "father of modern genetics."
Mendel studied math, physics, and eventually botany in school. While conducting experiments breeding hybridized pea plants in the monastery garden and greenhouse, he discovered the principles of heredity. As one article on his life explains:
He chose to study the inheritance of seven traits (seed shape, seed coat tint, flower color, flower location, pod shape, unripe pod color, and plant height). Altogether Mendel grew and tested about 28,000 plants. He discovered mathematical patterns in the inheritance of these traits, which he explained in terms of two laws (the "Law of Segregation" and the "Law of Independent Assortment"), which are now called Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.
Mendel developed a theory involving what he called dominant and recessive "factors"—what would come to be known as "genes." This work paved the way for all future research in the genetic sciences, including the discovery of DNA. But his contributions would not be recognized in his lifetime.
In 1866, Mendel published the results of his experiments. The paper received little attention. In 1868 he was named abbot (head monk) of his monastery, and his research gave way to administrative obligations. In 1884, he died.
Things began to change in 1900. That year, a British biologist named William Bateson unearthed Mendel's paper. He translated it into English and became a proponent of the ideas therein. Bateson's own experiments extended Mendel's discoveries, showing, for example, that Mendelian principles applied to animals as well as plants. He also bestowed the name genetics onto this area of study.
Today, Mendel is widely recognized, as Britannica puts it, as "the architect of genetic experimental and statistical analysis."
Biographies of Mendel also point to a history of run-ins with the state by the famed researcher. These took at least two forms.
When he first arrived at St. Thomas's Abbey, Mendel was assigned to a teaching job. But the Austro-Hungarian government around that time began requiring an exam for teacher certification. Mendel, who suffered from severe test anxiety, attempted the exam on two occasions, six years apart, and failed it both times.
Two decades later, as abbot, Mendel again found himself at loggerheads with the authorities after a new city law attempted to subject the monastery to heavy taxation. "The very idea made Mendel boil," writes Robin Marantz Henig in The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics. "The abbot began a single-handed letter-writing campaign," which became "more detailed, more impassioned, more strident, and more vituperative as the years went on….The stubborn abbot never wavered in his insistence that a tax on church property was unconstitutional."
The battle lasted until Mendel's death a decade later. He never did agree to pay the tax.
He doesn’t look a day over 150 years old.
I believe he coined the phrase “Visualize Whirrled Peas.”
“ In 1884, he died.
Things began to change in 1900.”
—————
Writing is dead.
She is saying that his idea did not catch on till after he died.
Writing is dead.
And if writing is dead, what do you call editing?
It’s just explaining that the significance of his findings was not recognized in his lifetime.
And Empire is pointing out that the transition has been criminally abused.
He also falsified his results.
Later analysis revealed that certain infrequent genetic processes never happened in Mendel’s extensive data. (Crossing over)
Likely deleted because they were too cumbersome for him to explain at the time.
All i am saying is — give peas a chance.
The Monk in the Garden is a great biography of Mendel, the true father of modern biology, not Darwin.
https://archive.org/details/monkingardenlost00heni
Darwin didn’t even open Mendel’s article on genetics that Mendel sent him. The manuscript was found unopened after Darwin died.
Mendel go no credit or recognition in his lifetime.
kinda wonder who he voted for in the 2020 election...
Deaditing?
Genetics cannot be true. Mendel was a religious man.
“And if writing is dead, what do you call editing?”
Non-existent.
Thanks for this. It’s like remembering an old friend which we old people like to do. Gregor Mendel wrote one paper which made him an immortal.
His paper is available for anyone to read. It is not difficult if you’ve some familiarity with scientific papers.
He does owe some credit to Darwin for his work and perhaps focused on speciation because of that. Mendel thought that speciation could be due to hybridization which was the subject of his paper.
In his concluding remarks he says:
“We meet with an essential difference in those hybrids which remain constant in their progeny and propagate themselves as truly as the pure species.... For the history of the evolution of plants this circumstance is of special importance, since constant hybrids acquire the status of new species.” http://www.mendelweb.org/Mendel.html
Mendel’s work was initially received with sceptism because of the idea that dominant traits should overwhelm populations. It wasn’t truly accepted until the early 20th century when the Hardy–Weinberg principle refuted Mendel’s critics.
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