Celebrating Mendel’s 150th anniversary

Abstract

> If Darwinian evolution be natural selection combined with heredity then the single statement which embraces the whole field of heredity must prove as epoch-making to the biologist as the law of gravitation to the astronomer . 1 > > K. Pearson, mathematician and statistician (1857–1936). Gregor Mendel (1822–84) discovered such a statement encompassing the whole field of heredity by sexual reproduction, and as endorsed by Karl Pearson, must be compared to Isaac Newton, one of the world’s greatest scientists. This year is the 150th anniversary that Mendel’s laws of inheritance were published in 1866 entitled Versuche uber Pflanzen-Hybriden. 2 Mendel appears as the sole founding father of modern genetics, unlike most sciences where several people are often credited. Mendel came from Heinzendorf, a village close to Brunn (now called Brno) in the Czech Republic. He spent almost all his working life in the Augustinian Monastery of St. Thomas in Brunn and rose from a monk to elected Abbot from 1868 to 1884.3 Comparing a Catholic monk to Isaac Newton raises controversy. Many people attacked Mendel’s results and most virulent was the British geneticist Professor Sir Ronald A Fisher FRS (1890–1962) who wrote4: ‘the paper is only intelligible if the experiments reported in it were fictitious; the data of the later experiments were biased strongly in agreement with expectation’; concluding ‘the data of most, if not all of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel’s expectations’. Mud sticks and many people react to Mendel's …