Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT Gregor Mendel's classic paper, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybrids), was published in 1866, hence 2016 is its sesquicentennial. Mendel completed his experiments in 1863 and shortly thereafter began compiling the results and writing his paper, which he presented in meetings of the Natural Science Society in Brünn in February and March of 1865. Mendel owned a personal copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, a German translation published in 1863, and it contains his marginalia. Its publication date indicates that Mendel's study of Darwin's book could have had no influence while he was conducting his experiments but its publication date coincided with the period of time when he was preparing his paper, making it possible that Darwin's writings influenced Mendel's interpretations and theory. Based on this premise, we prepared a Darwinized English translation of Mendel's paper by comparing German terms Mendel employed with the same terms in the German translation of Origin of Species in his possession, then using Darwin's counterpart English words and phrases as much as possible in our translation. We found a substantially higher use of these terms in the final two (10th and 11th) sections of Mendel's paper, particularly in one key paragraph, where Mendel reflects on evolutionary issues, providing strong evidence of Darwin's influence on Mendel.
A few pages into the first chapter of the 1859 first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, readers encounter a sentence that succinctly states what was true at the time: "The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown" (Darwin 1859, p. 13). Ten years later, in the fifth edition, Darwin slightly altered the wording: "The laws of inheritance are for the most part unknown" (Darwin 1869, p. 14). By this time Mendel's classic paper Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybrids) had been in print for slightly more than 2 years. Yet, there is compelling evidence that Darwin knew nothing of Mendel then, or at any time of his life, in spite of much speculation to the contrary. Some historians have lamented that had Darwin read Mendel's paper, a "meeting of the minds" between the two might have ensued that would have dramatically altered the course of modern biology; others counter that their views were too divergent for them to have found...