Heredity Explored [book review] (original) (raw)

Principles and biological concepts of heredity before Mendel

Biology Direct, 2021

The knowledge of the history of a subject stimulates understanding. As we study how other people have made scientific breakthroughs, we develop the breadth of imagination that would inspire us to make new discoveries of our own. This perspective certainly applies to the teaching of genetics as hallmarked by the pea experiments of Mendel. Common questions students have in reading Mendel’s paper for the first time is how it compares to other botanical, agricultural, and biological texts from the early and mid-nineteenth centuries; and, more precisely, how Mendel’s approach to, and terminology for debating, topics of heredity compare to those of his contemporaries? Unfortunately, textbooks are often unavailing in answering such questions. It is very common to find an introduction about heredity in genetic textbooks covering Mendel without mentions of preceding breeding experiments carried out in his alma mater. This does not help students to understand how Mendel came to ask the questi...

Gregor Mendel and the History of Heredity

2018

Gregor Mendel’s paper "Experiments on Plant Hybrids" (1866) has become a paradigmatic case in the historiography of the life sciences because production and reception of a “discovery” sharply fell apart, thus raising fundamental questions about the relationship between scientific achievement and “its” time. In this chapter, I am providing an overview of answers that have been given to these questions by various historians. In a first section, I cover commentators who have claimed that Mendel was “ahead” of his time, and that contemporaries failed to recognize his achievement. I then move on to scholars and scientists who argued against this position, claiming that Mendel was not anticipating twentieth-century genetics, but was in fact representative of an older research tradition. In a last step, I turn to the more recent cultural history of heredity according to which Mendel was embedded in a local culture that combined a variety of advanced and traditional strands of nineteenth-century life-sciences. Overall, I am arguing that one should not overestimate the coherence and dominance of presumed “paradigms”, “epistemes” or “styles” in biology.