The legacy of Darwin 2: Don’t forget brother Gregor

About the same time that Darwin was publishing The Origin of Species, a little known monk was beavering away in a monastic garden growing peas. Gregor Mendel gave us ‘the gene’and illustrated the historical truth that science has more often proceeded from faith, than from opposition to it.

Johann Mendel was born into a poor farming family and grew to love the natural world. After entering an Augustinian monastery, and being given the name Gregor, he was sent to the University of Vienna to train as a teacher, but he did not impress. His teachers said that he lacked ‘insight and requisite clarity of knowledge’. Returning to the monastery as a disgrace he consoled himself in the monastic garden doing experiments with peas and bees.

Over the course of several years he grew about 28,000 peas in his garden and carefully documented how their characteristics were inherited from one generation to another. He was the first to realise that the individual characteristics of plants were passed on like a ‘packet’ to the next generation and he called these packets, genes.

In 1865 brother Gregor delivered his results at a scientific meeting in Brunn, but the gathered scientists were not impressed. He then published it as an article, but no one paid any attention. The article was mentioned in other scientific writings only 3 times in the next 35 years. Gregor Mendel died with his work unknown.

You can read Mendel’s original paper here.

Finally - in the early twentieth century people began to take notice of his work. Almost every textbook of genetics now begins with the experiments of Gregor Mendel.

I wonder why we were so slow to recognise this great work? Was it because it was done outside of the institutions?

I wonder why today it attracts so much less attention than someone like Darwin? 

One of the reasons that we may ignore Mendel in our thinking today is that we have developed a story about science as having arisen in opposition to faith. The truth is rather more subtle. While the church as an institution occasionally opposed scientific progress, many of the first scientists were believers. Like brother Gregor.

Historians of science suggest that the Christian faith promoted a perspective on the world and a spirit of enquiry that encouraged the advent of science.

As the world embarks on a new journey trying to address the environmental challenges we face, some of the discoveries we need today will come from outside the institutions and will be formed by people of a simple faith who seek to enquire about things as they are and things as they might be.

For more on faith and the rise of science see Rodney Stark For the Glory of God

By the way, Darwin got genes hopelessly wrong. He developed a theory whereby parents’ characteristics were sort of blended together in their offspring.

Suggested Task: What areas of knowledge do we need fresh research on today?

I am just amazed at how many basic things about living life in harmony with the earth and its creatures that we need to find out. Start a thread in the locutory about something that you think we need to understand.

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