Mendel: Corroboration of the idea of binary trait coding by methods of statistical physics

Abstract

The paper by the Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” laid the foundation of the new field of knowledge, genetics, 150 years ago. It claimed that any characteristic is determined by two factors. On the one hand, the Mendelian idea of the binary coding of characteristics was inspired by Christian Doppler, with whose department Mendel had been in contact for seven years. On the other hand, the regularities discovered by Mendel confirmed the intuitive notion of the divine principle based on rational foundations of Pythagoras living in the 6th century AD, who was the first to point to the spiritual grounds of being: the world was created by the number, and the number is a nonmaterial and insensuous entity. All students of heredity before Mendel traced the fate of a characteristic in the succession of generations. Instead, in order to unveil the heredity mechanism, Mendel traced the fates of two invisible factors that determined the characteristic. Probably, the ideas of binary combinations and mathematical probabilistic variants arose from Mendel’s long meditation and an imaginary experiment. Experiments on pea crosses were undertaken in order to test this speculative idea of a set of invisible determinants. Methods borrowed from statistical physics allowed Mendel to decipher the process occurring in the experiments with the pea model: the fate of a characteristic is determined by the action of two invisible factors.