Gregor Mendel and the History of Heredity

Abstract

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.

Ihr Lettern, meines Forschens Sprossen ...

Gregor Mendel, 1830s

First line from a poem that Gregor Mendel sketched in the late 1830s during his time at the gymnasium of Opava (Troppau). It can be translated as “Oh letters, rungs of my research ...”; the poem celebrates Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable print. Quoted from Iltis (1924, 14)