Filsafat

Now the second step: we from the second generation as mendel did.we fertilise the hybrids,
this time with their own pollen. We allow the pods to from, plant the seeds, and here is the
second generation. It is not all of anything, for it is bot uniform; there is a majority of tall
plant, but a significant minority of short plant should becalculablefrom mendel guess about
heredity; for if he was right, each hybrid in the first generation carried one dominant and one
recessive gene. Therefore in one mating out every four between first generation hybrid, two
recessive gene have come together, and as a result one plant out of every four should be
short.and so it is: in the second generation, one plant out of four is short , and three are
tall.this is the famous ratio of one out of four.or one to three, that every one associates with
mendels name- and rightly so. As mendel reported.
Out of 1064 plants, in 787 cases the steam was long and in 277short. Hencea mutual ratio of
2. 84 to ... if now the result of the whole of the experiment be brought together, there is found,
as between the number of forms with the dominant and recessive characters, an average
ratio of 2.98 to 1 or 3 to 1.
It is now clear that the hybrid from seeds having one or other of two differetiating characters
and of these one half develop again the hybrid form, while the other half yield plants which
remain constant and receive dominant or the recessive characters (respectively) inequal
numbers.
Mendel published his result in 1866 in the journal of the Brno natural history society,
and achived instant oblivion. No one cared. No one understood his work. Even when he
wrote to a distinguished, rather stuffy figure in the field, karl nageli, it was clear that he had
no notion what mendel was talking about. Of course, if mendel had been a professional
scientist, he would now have pushed to get the results known and at least published the paper
more widely in franceor britain in a journal that botanist and biologists read. He did try to
reach scientists abroad by sending them reprints of his paper, but that is a long short for an
unknown writing in an unknown journal. However, at this moment, in 1868, two years after
the paper was published, a most unexpected thing happened to mendel. He was elected
abbotof his monastery. And for the rest of his life he carried out his duties with commendable
zeal, and a touch of neurotic punctilio.
He told nageli that he hoped to go on doing breeding experiments. But the
only thing that mendel noe was able to breed were bees he had always been anxious to
push his work from plants to animals. And of course, being mendel, he had his usual mixture
of splendid intellectual fortune and practical bad luck he made a hybrid strain of bees which
gave excellent honey; but alas, they were so ferocious that they stung everybody for miles
around and had to be destroy.
Mendel seems to have been more exercised about tax demands on the monastery than
about its religious leadership. And there is a hint that he was regarded as unreliable by the
emperors secret police. Under the abbots brow there lay a weight of private thougt.

The puzzle of mendels personality is an intellectual one. No one could have

conceived those experiment unless they had clearly in their minds the answer that they were
going to get. It is a strange state of affairs, and i should give you chapter and verse for that.
First, a practical point.mendel chose seven differences between peas to test for at the
time, such as tall versus short, and so on. And indeed the peas does hav seven pairs of
chromosomes, so you can test for seven different characters in genes lying on seven different
choromosomes. But that is the largest number you chould have chosen. You chould not test
for eight different characters without getting two of the genes lying on the some
choromosome, and therefore being at least partially linked. Nobody had thought of genes or
heard of linkage then. Nobody hadeven heard of choromosome at the time when mendel was
actually working on the paper.
Now surely you can be destined to be the abbot of a monastery, you can be chosen by
god, but you cannot have that luck. Mendel must have done a good deal of observation and
experiment before the formal work, in order to tease out these and convice himself that seven
qualities or character was just what he could get away with. There we glimpse the great
iceberg of the mind in that secret, hidden face of mendels on which the paper and the
achievement float. And you see it; you see it on every page of the manuscript- the algebraic
symbolism, the statistic, the clarity of the exposition; everything is modren genetics,
essentially as it is done now, but done more than a hundred years ago by an unknown
And done by an unknown who had one crucial inspiration: that characters separate in
an all or none fashion. Mend