Luck is common in science. Consider Kepler. He attempted to prove Copernicus (circular heliocentric solar system) right by using Tycho Brahe's data (more data points and better precision than ever before). Given his goal, he chose the worst planet; Mars. Other than Mercury, which was difficult to get enough data given the astronomy of the day, Mars has the most eccentric orbit. Poor Kepler, he spent years on his calculations only to conclude that Copernicus was wrong. However, it was lucky for his legacy, since if his calculations showed a circular orbit, Kepler would have been a footnote. Instead, his selection of Mars forced him to use an ellipse, instead of a simple circle, thus making him a major player in astronomy and physics.
It's the same way your limited by your tools, senses and experience in dictating reality, at best it's a gross approximation and at worse your observing a false reality with its own consistent logic
What you call luck might just be that he noticed some patterns and that he was selective in his subject and limited the scope of the experiment to what he knew he could explain.
@@mathieuxlaflamme2322 And I am saying it was likely a deliberate choice for those reasons. People had noticed heredity and heritable traits, so it would have been a silly waste of time to prove the point with an organism he didnt know would support his idea.
@@mathieuxlaflamme2322 he worked on different things, and was smart enough to recognize that peas had some promising properties and stick with them. not luck
I mean, he had already been breeding peas for years, so it doesn't seem weird that he could have suspected that there was a clear pattern, after all, in the cases in which Mendel's laws do work it's pretty apparent
In a Botany class, we studied the genetics of albinism in sorghum plants. That was pretty straightforward inheritance. The poor albino ones suffered early deaths. 😢
Farmers and crop husbandry has been studying offspring for thousands of years. This Medel is surely important to science, but Christ the narrow framing that gives him credit let alone assign him luck for discovering what native cultivators literally designed the plants to do is ridiculous.
could this be survivers bias? we remember him for studying genetics because he was lucky and studied easily observable traits. however there could be countless people who tried to study the same things in different organisms and the results were too complex to understand without the findings from these studies
That's the case with just about any field, but keep in mind, that Mendel was essentially one of those people you just described, and his work was only discovered posthumously.
absolutely. Look up biometricians, who were big shots in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Most traits of interest-like height or, in fact, eye color-are "complex" and don't apparently follow Mendelian inheritance rules. Mendel's true luck is that he happened to have had the time to make detailed observations of anecdotal traits. It turned out this was the right starting point, and that variation in more important traits could also be explained with these rules albeit in a roundabout way
Hundreds of years before him and at the same time he was alive, many others in the fields of science were inquiring on heritability, he just happened to have a nice way to see how some traits happened and this worked out really well when later geneticists found his papers decades later. Its not really survivor bias, its just a great place to start the idea of heritability and how it works. He was certainly lucky though
@@peterkennedy7219 getting older scares me :( I never even considered the mortality of my parents, but from age 60-65 they have aged so much, gone grey, then my pops got cancer. That's when it really hit me. Then it dawned on me that I'm already 30, and the day absolutely will come, as real as this very moment, where I will be looking in the mirror back at a 65 year old me, and my time on this earth will, at least for the majority, be used up. Scares me because from 20 to 30 time has accelerated so fast that if it keeps it up like this, literally no time at all will have passed before its here. Oh my god existential dread is coming on heavy right now ahhh
@@curiodyssey3867 I get it. My dad died at 37 when I was 14. Really messed with my head when I hit 37 and have since passed it by 8 years. Never figured I would make past 40. Part of the reason I never had kids.
He didn't start with peas or study only peas; he first started with animals but religious leaders opposed his studying of animal sex so he switched to peas, and he had also bred and hybridized bees for much of his life.
Wait, you're telling me the church wasnt cool letting this guy watch animals bang each other, but they're perfectly ok with him watching plants get it on?? Typical Christian hypocrites. Not to mention the fact he hybridized with bees, meaning he somehow was able to mate with these poor bees himself! what a twisted individual. Those poor bees probably never stood a chance....how....ugh. At least we got good science out of it. Ends justifying the means and what not.
@@benthomason3307 It was considered unethical to purposely breed animals unworthy for use in sacrifices and feast. So plants were more acceptable for experiment on.
It is a nice story, but there are no historical records of it. It likely goes back to Mendel's hawkweed crossing experiments. Hawkweed is also called mouse ear.
"In August 1853, Mendel returned to Brno, still uncertified as a science teacher but well trained in scientific theory and methodology. He immediately encountered an environment of official censure for secular pursuits, not unlike the ecclesiastical condemnation of science he had witnessed in Vienna. The Bishop of Brno, Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch, had been assigned to investigate the Augustinian monasteries in Prague, Krakow, and Brno for secularism, beginning in 1853 while Mendel was still in Vienna (Orel 1996; Klein and Klein 2013). In 1854, after Mendel had returned, Schaffgotsch conducted an on-site investigation. In his report, recommending that the monastery be disbanded, he wrote (as translated by Klein and Klein 2013): “In a word, in the house tending the Rule of St. Augustine reigns a secular spirit which the few lappets of the Augustinian habit fail to cover up”, and specifically of Mendel, “he studies profane sciences at a worldly institution in Vienna at the expense of the monastery to become a professor of said sciences at a state institution” (p. 295)." - nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0289-9 (Mendel and Darwin: untangling a persistent enigma, 2020) "Although he began his research using mice, he later switched to plants because his bishop (Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch) found studying animal sexuality offensive and inappropriate for the status of a monk. Hence, Mendel decided to use garden peas as his primary experimental model" - nature.com/articles/s41431-023-01303-1 (Johann Gregor Mendel: the victory of statistics over human imagination, 2023)
i was really glad to learn about mendel's work in high school bio!! remembering what a punnet square is was super helpful when diagnosed with a recessive genetic condition. it hasnt been seen before in our family's memory, but we knew which cousins to get tested for carrier genes bc of that ol peahead mendel
One of my professors - Daniel Fairbanks is obsessed with this question and part of what he learned reading all of his original notes in Germany showed he was super hardworking. He tested lots of different plants and had a bunch of traits that he measured that didn’t fit the ratios expected. He did t report on all of them, in part because he got promoted to Abbott and didn’t have time.
If I'm not mistaken he had plenty of plants and studies. He did plenty of documentation all the way through, it probably be a semi interesting read if I could find it.
Ya, I feel the title and premise of this video is misleading. He came upon peas while studying other plants and other traits. He didn’t just choose the traits at random as is said in the video. An amazing mind and diligent observation, not luck, lead to Mendels discoveries.
Yeah, pretty sure he was a very talented gardener already and had a very good intuition for which plant to pick and which traits. There is a saying that goes ‘Chance favors the prepared mind’
@@jjsparks_9025 Yeah and says "well maybe he just lied?" but then ... they dont talk about how. They dont talk about whether he did good or bad science, or how he "massaged the evidence", etc....
@@Nazuiko Exactly. I was especially curious about the lying part but they glossed it over. The video is sus. It looks as if they wanted to diminish Mendel's works.
@@stempki The monastery where he worked was the crop source for several Parishes in the Local Bishop's Diocese. Much of to food was grown for the Bishop, Priests, Deacons, Monks, Nuns, and what we would now call Charity Dining Halls.
Isn’t it crazy that he found this and died not knowing if humans would be able to know if his work would apply to humans. Imagine knowing the information he knew without knowing how dog traits work or how applying Mendelian genetics to Darwinian evolution would revolutionize our theories of how we got here. There was so much potential to be found! Then in the 90’s that potential was found when the human genome was mapped out and we knew the scale of genetics in humans. Nowadays, teenagers scoff because learning simple genetics gets confusing. But it truly is a miracle that we can know the way genes work and, more than that, start applying what we know to cloning animals or whatever the next step is going to be! Mendel will never know how revolutionary he was from just fiddling with peas.
Mendel’s laws have a ton of exceptions, yet we still use it as the basics even in genetic epidemiology today. A lot of our research is based on Mendel’s laws. All the discoveries we make about genetics today couldn’t have been made without Mendel’s laws as the base we build upon
Albeit it is basic, it still basic enough that any normal person can understand it. It is how people use to breed certain animals to get certain traits without understanding the deep reasons for it. For example, Shrimp Breeding in the aquarium hobby etc.
Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur. One must be ready to ask questions. The first man to create nylon saw no use for it and dumped down the drain. The second man asked what can be done with this. As Asimov said, the most important words in science aren’t “what if”, but “Hmm, that’s funny…”
@@shawnsg you don't think that it was a blind guess, but educated by them who came before him? Cause, I mean, obviously. And as such stop invisiblizing the common wisdom for some pale-face science-guy who INVENTED genes. It wasn't luck, it was farmers and cultivators and agriculture birthed from husbandry shared by old-wives for thousands--thats right--thousands of years. That he had access bc of luck is like saying you're lucky to have access to electricity. True enough but way beyond the bucket. Not relevant.
Instead of claiming (without evidence) that he "might have gotten lucky OR lied," you could theorize that perhaps he knew *exactly* what he was doing and picked a research subject that had a limited number of consistently differing traits so that he could remove extraneous variables. Nah. Couldn't be...
Read somewhere he was originally breeding rats but had to pick something else when other monks in the monastery started complaining about his test subjects. I guess it's not just the stench but that he's observing them getting it on that grossed out his collegues.
They're just suggesting he might have lied given how precise some of his results were considering what we know now. And maybe it's not true, but worth mentioning.
He definitely got lucky by deciding to study peas. He studied many plants, but by having peas he could actually draw the relevant conclusions. Claiming Mendel might have lied, simply due to the precision of pea results, seems yellow journalistic, but that just means his results were lucky.
He probably ran a lot of experiments, and only published the one that agreed with his theory (silently discarding data that did not agree with it as outliers or failed experiments) - this was a common occurrence back when cross-analysis was not a thing anyone cared about. And he probably talked to farmers who were involved in selection and likely noticed some of the patterns before he did - or at least that they stay consistent. He just never credited any of them - again as it was common back then...
@@poldertalk Yes but I believe it's a reasonable and plausible guess. It is what I would have probably done if I was in his place back then. It may seem scandalous now but was within expectations of the era.
A dose of SciShow to remind me of my biologist background and keep up my hopes of one day return to my studies, love this channel, if one day I go back to teaching I might use some of your videos haha (after translating to portuguese of course)
@@ishana6038 no, right now I work with IT assistance, which is something I like but the pay sucks, also too many unpaid overtime work, as I teacher at least the pay is slightly better and a bit less unpaid overtime work
I used Mendel's theory all the time, so I'm super excited to watch this! I breed snakes and we calculate a TON of different things with this method! Though, as mentioned, there are many exceptions to the rule... but for the most part it works for what i need!
Sam Kean’s book, “The Violinist Thumb”, is about genes and genetics. I’m learning about the scientists behind the science and things I wish I’d known back in my college genetics class.
Maybe working with peas gave him the inspiration to look into this matter further, something he might not have done with other organisms. The peas chose him. :D
thought the same, somewhat unfair to have it in the title but not in the video itself.. cause that's what's gonna stick in your mind even if it's wrong after all..
I mean, it sure looks lucky when you focus on the one success story, sure. He's the one successful scientist studying it at the time. We don't pay attention to the thousands of other naturalists of his time who weren't studying the right plant and hadn't made this discovery.
Mendel studied many plants. Among them peas were the easiest to analyze. Their gene patterns were simple enough for him to understand after observation, so he could actually draw conclusions. We don’t hear about his other plants, likely because their patterns were to complex to be neatly categorized and he had difficulty observing them to the same extent as peas.
Mendel was not lucky. He studied peas for a long time before he chose which traits to follow. You give the impression that scientists sit down, do one experiment, write up the paper, and become rich and famous. Most experiments for research scientists result in failure. It is only after many experiments and many years of hard work do they get publishable results.
... he didnt "choose" to study peas. he NOTICED something peculiar and then wrote it down, and observed the patterns associated with some traits. it noticed something an studied it he didnt just say "oh man im going to study a plant that i have no reason to pay attention to" so like most discoveries in new fields of study it was luck and being curious.
I have read Mendel's original paper on pea genetics and he was way smarter than the average. He made a conscious choice to breed peas because they were easy to work with and a large body of work by pea breeders was available to provide consistent, unmixed supply of packets of specific peas to work with. They were commercially important, so the pea breeders before him could supply ideas and a practical starting point.
Maybe it wasn't like "Oh well, time to study genetics. Lets pick peas" but instead he was already working with peas and noticed the pattern (because it was so clear in this case) and studied it. So it wasn't luck at all. It was the peas that triggered the study in the first place.
I still think that labeling Mendel's choice as "lucky pick" is simplistic, because he probably didn't discover this phenomenon using peas on the first place. it's known fact that Mendel was initially conducting experiments on small mammals before his church ruled it to be immoral. Mendel was likely aware of the pattern long before his research on peas and just used this plant because it was a good example.
mendel and charles darwin could've shared ideas, but the person who told mendel that he would publish mendel's work for him, but that guy was a fellow religous person who purposely put it somewhere that it would never be found. we could be 100 years ahead in genetics and evolution if it wasn't for that. ironically, thank god that some (I think grad students) found his work.
I wish this video went into some of the actual info that people are using to claim he was "massaging the data". That was why I clicked on this video and now I'm just left with the question "was he?"
Read somewhere that it really went down to some luck. He was originally breeding rats but his superiors in the monastery finally had enough of the stench that they forced him to pick something else to study. And so he ended up with peas.
I'm a bit disappointed that there was no more than a single comment on that item. Analysis of his data match the outcomes a bit too well. One would expect a bit more variability in "real" data. Now, it is still possible that he was lucky in his data as well as his subject matter. The key to understand is those suggesting the data might be edited to prove the hypothesis are not saying he was wrong. In the case of binary and independent genes, his principles are valid, and that has been proven over and over again since his time. Others have suggested that he selected the organism and the traits as they seemed to have a clear pattern. He then investigated that pattern until he could better understand how the traits combined. I'm sure he was not the first to see patterns in inheritance, but he is the first to document his theory and provide data to back it up.
@@YeOldeTraveller Confirmation Bias is often an Unmentioned/Ignored Flaw in many Scientific Research Studies. Isaac Asimov in his Autobiography mention he almost failed Biochemistry for reporting all his results and refusing to leave out data points that did not agree with the results expected by the baseline hypothesis.
That chromosome part reminded me how people who have Down syndrome have a unique look to them, because their chromosomes are different. For some reason it was mind blowing to me even though I already knew genes affect how you look.
Another example of luckily choosing the right model is the characterization of RNAi in C elegans! The founder of the nematode as a model system Dr Sydney Brenner, initially planned to use a close relative C briggsea instead. However, C briggsea cannot do systemic RNAi in the same way C elegans can. So if he’d chosen the other way we might still be working out cosupression!
I love learning about genetics, since I have a genetic disorder, I feel like I need to know EVERYTHING about genetics and what went “wrong” with my deletion genetic disorder
Most likely, he tracked a ton of traits and those were the only traits that he was able to definitively say weren't linked (and could find a pattern for).
I grew up raising silk worms as a family hobby. Think of it as an annual, short-term, recurring pet. A few years into it, we decided to perform genetic experiments and did selective breeding by color. After a few years, we had produced fully colorless worms. Unfortunately, they also ended up with birth defects! Missing half segments of their body was the most visible issue. It was interesting to watch happen as a kid in elementary school.
That's an interesting case of "independent assortment" not applying. A commonly known example among snake hobbyists is "spider" ball pythons. "Spider" is a pattern in the snake's coloration that cropped up by random mutation and was then bred for, but is apparently linked to motor issues, known as "spider wobble" that occur with varying severity.
I think some people are missing the point. Also, part of this is going to be subjective on what all you consider luck. _maybe he had intuition about peas from raising them_ He didn't just randomly go out in the garden and notice something and decide to figure it out. Dominant and recessive traits are already known. Mendel went to school that was known for hereditary work. He had a close acquaintance that was interested in plants. He apparently owned a book called "Experiments and Observations upon Hybridization in the Plant Kingdom" that included peas. _he bred other plants and animals_ Yeah and think how lucky he was that of the 400,000 plant species world wide he had one that followed this very basic hereditary model. He's also lucky because the traits he chose are ones that are independent and fit his model which is obvious in hindsight but imagine all the different variables he could have chosen and he happened to choose the 7 best. I don't think anyone is implying he didn't work hard, but it's irrational to assume luck didn't play a role.
I have another question and I'm not sure if you already have a video on this: how would the sorld change if gravity was 1% stronger or weaker? How about 10%? How would animals develop (denser bones or rather lighter, would the joints degenerate sooner/slower? Would we live longer bc the cardiovascular system has to work less against gravity if there was less gravity to overcome?...) just had this thought and wondered if more gravity would be great for training our body just with daily tasks vut then thought that our joints wouldn't be able to take it for long...
This is weird question and I am not sure it will be answered because neither you nor anyone else is in position to change the gravity a single bit. And no one knows the material system hiding behind gravity (by the way Einstein was definitely wrong with gravity). It is the same kind of question like when you ask what would happen if humans have two heads (and two brains), four legs or even wings to fly. All this is possible but not always meaningful. You should be more interested about evolution and how it works in detail. Biology will not explain it to you as I show in my videos.
@@Dr.Z.Moravcik-inventor-of-AGI thank you for the insight. I am indeed interested in biology and am currently studying medicine :) if fact thinking about factors impacting the cardiovascular system and therefore limiting life expectancy led me to this thought. Other areas of knowledge are also fascinating so I‘m happy to keep learning. Yes, „what if“ questions might not really help with anything other than to entertain me
@@katharinafeustel5864 Sure I know what you mean. Most of the medical doctors rely on biology which is of no use if you want to understand human body perfectly. Body is only molecules ordered in space & time which is chemistry and molecules on atomic level is physics and so on. Making biologists talk about it is just waste of time. Answer to your question is that changing the gravity would require tremendous amount of change of human body structure (both anatomy and physiology). You would need to rebuild the body like when you want a car to suddenly float on the water. If increasing gravity about 10% means that instead of 100kg you would weigh 110kg, then your body could probably cope with it (like women usually weigh substantially less, like for example 55kg instead of 50kg is no problem for human body). This is no evolution but adaption capability of human body. Most of the structures of human body have adaption capability, which means that they can adapt to changes. Like for example your body height adapted to sudden changes in recent past and humans are bigger now (they say it was caused by increased sugar intake and better nutrition in general). So cardiovascular system and bones certainly can adapt as well (just think about what physical training /which is also a sudden change/ can do with human body). Also when your cardiovascular system develops new ramifications of arteries, veins and capillaries, it is no evolution (they usually call this phenomena wrongly 'microevolution') but it is only adaption of human body to changes. Unfortunately adaption of human body has its LIMITS and when they are reached it is like I have written. Rebuilding of the whole body is needed. Then we should start talking about evolution. Like for example when your body height should increase to 4-5 meters, then most of your systems in your body would stop working correctly and all of the human anatomy and physiology would require a rebuild.
It makes me wonder what would have happened if Mendel and Darwin ended up in a room together (assuming they could both communicate in a common language, like Latin). Or if they happened to correspond with each other. Darwin was only 13 years older than Mendel, and they died 2 years apart, so it would have been quite feasible for them to have met or read about each other - if they had been in the same circles. In some ways, their fields complement each other: Mendel's ideas of inheritance would've explained how traits are inherited, giving Darwin's ideas of evolution by natural selection a firmer base.
Well, Mendel was fairly set in one spot at that monastery, so maybe if Darwin had decided to visit one day? Based on Darwin's relationship with Christianity at the time, with his ideas being new and all, it might have been very possible that Mendel wouldn't have liked what Darwin had to say 😂
@@johnhoelzeman6683 Possibly! I think it might be more realistic that Mendel could conceivably come across some of Darwin's writings on evolution, and co-opt those ideas to complete his explanation of inheritance and look at the bigger picture.
as a cat breeder I have to say that those rules do not have exceptions. as in you never get a red cat out if both parents don't have red, you don't get a white cat unless at least one of the parents is white, breeding white+white is outlawed (at least in europe) because this guarantees higher percentage of white kittens but most would be unviable etc. (same is possible with crops if you want to count them - some pairings do promise a higher outcome mathematically but it might be unviable as well and last only a couple of days according to the same law). but it is as unbreakable as it gets. another thing altogether is that far from all features are set on just one allele. some features are like one note, others are like a full moonlight sonata. also something 'linked' can become unlinked over time. for example about 20 years ago in my breed chocolate coat color was linked with copper eye color (while breed standard requires green). years of selection changed that. if population is huge this link can be present in only one family or line of a subject. or maybe in all but one. this link is just a link, it has to do with the dna chain structure, not the mendelian law itself. also there exist more or less regular genetic mutations that can look like the law isn't perfect until you don't know better. so considering all I know about the subject matter over about 20 years of my own work +communication with colleagues I have NOT seen a single case when the law was untrue.
I think when one hobbyist discovers a completely unknown aspect of the world, one that is alien to both their training and profession, some imprecision can be expected and forgiven. :)
There was still observation. Mendel originally looked at more traits, but discarded those which appeared to be linked. He finally chose the 7 traits. It wasn't just luck that these coincided with the 7 (n=7) chromosomes his peas had. In some ways he was predating use use of Morgans.
He chose to report only on the behavior of unlinked, single gene phenotypes. Lucky that he got away with it long enough to establish the importance of those findings until the more complicated cases of inheritance could be explained.
yeah exactly. I mean, the choice of pea plants *was* pure dumb luck (it was what the monastery would let him experiment with), but he actually documented all sorts of traits. He just had absolutely no clue what to do with the ones that were more complicated so he solely focused on the things he *could* explain. He explained that in the preface to his paper.
I would guess that Gregor Mendel gardened to aid contemplation and, on a whim, decided to breed varieties of peas with a blend between blue and white. Failing that, he then tried to breed pure blue and white varieties. He would have quickly succeeded with a white variety but not a blue one. Even so, the number of white ones would quickly fall each generation. Intrigued, he would then try cross-breeding the different colours. The fact that the next generation was all blue would be a big surprise, leading straight to his discovery. He would also observe that other traits, such as plant height and smooth vs wrinkled skins, followed a similar pattern independent of flower colour. The rest is history. It wasn't luck but careful observation.
Actually, the number of white ones would _not_ quickly fall each generation. That's one of the big misunderstanding of Mendelian genetics even today, with newspapers still printing "scientific" articles about things like "redheads are not going to exist in a few generations!". The actual number would instead quickly settle on a more or less fixed proportion, which is exactly the curious thing that underlines the "Huh, that's weird" that led into the development of genetics. Before Mendel (and of course, still long after him chronologically), the general idea of inheritance was that children are the mix of their parents. What Mendel has shown was that this mixing is _not_ a simple averaging of traits, but rather, that it's quantum, granular. And along with that was the discovery (or perhaps better said, a better explanation) of recessive traits - which can be transferred in the offspring _without_ showing up on the offspring. Of course, the phenomenon itself was noticed before - it was known that sometimes, traits seem to "skip" a generation or two. But Mendel's data made it very clear that this is a very regular, though also random, mechanism. While you can never tell exactly which children will display which traits, you _can_ know how many of each there will be, on average. Sometimes, the difference is not obvious. Today we know that this is because a) genes can share the same chromosome, and chromosomes cross over and b) some traits are actually caused by an interplay of many different genes. A child of a small parent and a tall parent will most often be intermediate height (all else equal), _but_ - it can also be even smaller, or even taller.
I have to wonder how much of those accusitions that he lied are not because he actually lied, but because they hate the fact that he was a Catholic monk & they want to ruin his reputation.
Science is a process of taking the complexity of reality and reducing it to a form which can fit into a human brain, not necessarily mine, but hopefully yours. (Storytelling is another.) At some point, the process of abstraction or simplification takes place. It is now considered best to perform this simplification in the most public and honest way as possible. But this, too, is something that needed to be learned.
It is said that the initial idea of vaccination - people that had cowpox did not get smallpox - was based on observations of common people. The guy just properly tested it scientifically. There were quite a few pea farmers out there. Farming is all about selective breeding. Mendel picked a case where the rules were simple from others experience, to get a good baseline. Leaving the harder cases for those after him (or his later attempts).
Well, it's not the first time I've heard Mendel's work was possibly based on more than luck. I've heard some refer to him as "the golden spoon" (as in cherry-picker) aside from the father of genetics.
Perhaps Mendel looked at dozens of traits and only wrote about the ones that could be explained by particle theory of inheritance and simple algebra. As for the linked traits and other traits (incompletely dominant, etc) he just left them out...
Why are scientists thinking he lied? If it's so easy to see heritage in a certain pea species it makes sense for someone breeding that species to form the heritage hypothesis
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Luck is common in science. Consider Kepler. He attempted to prove Copernicus (circular heliocentric solar system) right by using Tycho Brahe's data (more data points and better precision than ever before). Given his goal, he chose the worst planet; Mars. Other than Mercury, which was difficult to get enough data given the astronomy of the day, Mars has the most eccentric orbit. Poor Kepler, he spent years on his calculations only to conclude that Copernicus was wrong. However, it was lucky for his legacy, since if his calculations showed a circular orbit, Kepler would have been a footnote. Instead, his selection of Mars forced him to use an ellipse, instead of a simple circle, thus making him a major player in astronomy and physics.
Great example and storytelling!
+
It's the same way your limited by your tools, senses and experience in dictating reality, at best it's a gross approximation and at worse your observing a false reality with its own consistent logic
Luck seems common because we don't remember the unlucky ones.
Another classic example is how Hans Oersted accidentally discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism
Mendel's success is a great example of what can happen when you give peas a chance.
🙄
I heard he made up his mind after lying in bed for a week listening to a John Lemon sonata.
You missed starting the comment with "All I am saying,".
But we also know the only way to get peas is with a knife
Eye see what you did there, lolol 😆🤭
"Mendel and the Lucky Ps" would be a cool band name.
It does have a cool vibe.
Ever so slightly super geeky
Yes! 😂
I disagree no disrespect ... although the words have a cool vibration there's no meaning behind it and the word Mendel sounds very like mundane
Or perhaps a children's book?
What you call luck might just be that he noticed some patterns and that he was selective in his subject and limited the scope of the experiment to what he knew he could explain.
yeah, it's not luck, it's good intuition
The luck is his choice of plant. If he had chosen any other organism chances are that he wouldnt have had the results he got.
@@mathieuxlaflamme2322 And I am saying it was likely a deliberate choice for those reasons. People had noticed heredity and heritable traits, so it would have been a silly waste of time to prove the point with an organism he didnt know would support his idea.
@@mathieuxlaflamme2322 he worked on different things, and was smart enough to recognize that peas had some promising properties and stick with them. not luck
It was divine will that guided him! God must've given him a revelation! Take that, evolution! /s
I mean, he had already been breeding peas for years, so it doesn't seem weird that he could have suspected that there was a clear pattern, after all, in the cases in which Mendel's laws do work it's pretty apparent
Hmm, the purple ones are more common, but sometimes they make white ones! BUT WHY?!?!?!
*Founds Genetics*
In a Botany class, we studied the genetics of albinism in sorghum plants. That was pretty straightforward inheritance.
The poor albino ones suffered early deaths. 😢
Farmers and crop husbandry has been studying offspring for thousands of years. This Medel is surely important to science, but Christ the narrow framing that gives him credit let alone assign him luck for discovering what native cultivators literally designed the plants to do is ridiculous.
@@yossarrian He did not discover what they did. He discovered WHY they did what they did. That is what science is all about.
@@dannypipewrench533 ok yes, and that negates my point that his choice was not arbitrary nor lucky how?
could this be survivers bias? we remember him for studying genetics because he was lucky and studied easily observable traits. however there could be countless people who tried to study the same things in different organisms and the results were too complex to understand without the findings from these studies
I was thinking the exact same thing!
That's the case with just about any field, but keep in mind, that Mendel was essentially one of those people you just described, and his work was only discovered posthumously.
absolutely. Look up biometricians, who were big shots in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Most traits of interest-like height or, in fact, eye color-are "complex" and don't apparently follow Mendelian inheritance rules.
Mendel's true luck is that he happened to have had the time to make detailed observations of anecdotal traits. It turned out this was the right starting point, and that variation in more important traits could also be explained with these rules albeit in a roundabout way
Hundreds of years before him and at the same time he was alive, many others in the fields of science were inquiring on heritability, he just happened to have a nice way to see how some traits happened and this worked out really well when later geneticists found his papers decades later. Its not really survivor bias, its just a great place to start the idea of heritability and how it works. He was certainly lucky though
Exactly my thought
And the memories of genetics class I took in 1994 during my senior year of high school come flooding back. Loved that class!
Damn peter you're old man!
@@curiodyssey3867 yeah....I am...my body let's me know most days of that.
@@peterkennedy7219 getting older scares me :(
I never even considered the mortality of my parents, but from age 60-65 they have aged so much, gone grey, then my pops got cancer. That's when it really hit me. Then it dawned on me that I'm already 30, and the day absolutely will come, as real as this very moment, where I will be looking in the mirror back at a 65 year old me, and my time on this earth will, at least for the majority, be used up.
Scares me because from 20 to 30 time has accelerated so fast that if it keeps it up like this, literally no time at all will have passed before its here.
Oh my god existential dread is coming on heavy right now ahhh
@@curiodyssey3867 I get it. My dad died at 37 when I was 14. Really messed with my head when I hit 37 and have since passed it by 8 years. Never figured I would make past 40. Part of the reason I never had kids.
He didn't start with peas or study only peas; he first started with animals but religious leaders opposed his studying of animal sex so he switched to peas, and he had also bred and hybridized bees for much of his life.
Wait, you're telling me the church wasnt cool letting this guy watch animals bang each other, but they're perfectly ok with him watching plants get it on??
Typical Christian hypocrites.
Not to mention the fact he hybridized with bees, meaning he somehow was able to mate with these poor bees himself! what a twisted individual.
Those poor bees probably never stood a chance....how....ugh.
At least we got good science out of it. Ends justifying the means and what not.
"religious leaders." you mean _the other monks at his monastery?_
@@benthomason3307 It was considered unethical to purposely breed animals unworthy for use in sacrifices and feast. So plants were more acceptable for experiment on.
It is a nice story, but there are no historical records of it. It likely goes back to Mendel's hawkweed crossing experiments. Hawkweed is also called mouse ear.
"In August 1853, Mendel returned to Brno, still uncertified as a science teacher but well trained in scientific theory and methodology. He immediately encountered an environment of official censure for secular pursuits, not unlike the ecclesiastical condemnation of science he had witnessed in Vienna. The Bishop of Brno, Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch, had been assigned to investigate the Augustinian monasteries in Prague, Krakow, and Brno for secularism, beginning in 1853 while Mendel was still in Vienna (Orel 1996; Klein and Klein 2013). In 1854, after Mendel had returned, Schaffgotsch conducted an on-site investigation. In his report, recommending that the monastery be disbanded, he wrote (as translated by Klein and Klein 2013): “In a word, in the house tending the Rule of St. Augustine reigns a secular spirit which the few lappets of the Augustinian habit fail to cover up”, and specifically of Mendel, “he studies profane sciences at a worldly institution in Vienna at the expense of the monastery to become a professor of said sciences at a state institution” (p. 295)."
- nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0289-9 (Mendel and Darwin: untangling a persistent enigma, 2020)
"Although he began his research using mice, he later switched to plants because his bishop (Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch) found studying animal sexuality offensive and inappropriate for the status of a monk. Hence, Mendel decided to use garden peas as his primary experimental model"
- nature.com/articles/s41431-023-01303-1 (Johann Gregor Mendel: the victory of statistics over human imagination, 2023)
i was really glad to learn about mendel's work in high school bio!! remembering what a punnet square is was super helpful when diagnosed with a recessive genetic condition. it hasnt been seen before in our family's memory, but we knew which cousins to get tested for carrier genes bc of that ol peahead mendel
missed opportunity to call him a peabrain
So Mendel might not only be the father of genetics but also the father of pea hacking ... I'll show myself out...
That's true! (p < 0.05)
That's awful mean of you to say.
Serendipity and luck were actually vital for science, there was only so much you could invent with primitive tech; most things were just discovered.
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
Newton- "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giant"
Mendel was the start
One of my professors - Daniel Fairbanks is obsessed with this question and part of what he learned reading all of his original notes in Germany showed he was super hardworking. He tested lots of different plants and had a bunch of traits that he measured that didn’t fit the ratios expected. He did t report on all of them, in part because he got promoted to Abbott and didn’t have time.
isnt he a professor in utah valley university?
If I'm not mistaken he had plenty of plants and studies. He did plenty of documentation all the way through, it probably be a semi interesting read if I could find it.
Ya, I feel the title and premise of this video is misleading. He came upon peas while studying other plants and other traits. He didn’t just choose the traits at random as is said in the video. An amazing mind and diligent observation, not luck, lead to Mendels discoveries.
Yeah, pretty sure he was a very talented gardener already and had a very good intuition for which plant to pick and which traits. There is a saying that goes ‘Chance favors the prepared mind’
@@jjsparks_9025 Yeah and says "well maybe he just lied?" but then ... they dont talk about how.
They dont talk about whether he did good or bad science, or how he "massaged the evidence", etc....
@@Nazuiko Exactly. I was especially curious about the lying part but they glossed it over. The video is sus. It looks as if they wanted to diminish Mendel's works.
@@stempki The monastery where he worked was the crop source for several Parishes in the Local Bishop's Diocese. Much of to food was grown for the Bishop, Priests, Deacons, Monks, Nuns, and what we would now call Charity Dining Halls.
Thanks!
Mendel tables, brings back memories of my junior high. Probably one and only biology questions during exams that I loved.
Isn’t it crazy that he found this and died not knowing if humans would be able to know if his work would apply to humans. Imagine knowing the information he knew without knowing how dog traits work or how applying Mendelian genetics to Darwinian evolution would revolutionize our theories of how we got here. There was so much potential to be found! Then in the 90’s that potential was found when the human genome was mapped out and we knew the scale of genetics in humans.
Nowadays, teenagers scoff because learning simple genetics gets confusing. But it truly is a miracle that we can know the way genes work and, more than that, start applying what we know to cloning animals or whatever the next step is going to be! Mendel will never know how revolutionary he was from just fiddling with peas.
Mendel’s laws have a ton of exceptions, yet we still use it as the basics even in genetic epidemiology today. A lot of our research is based on Mendel’s laws. All the discoveries we make about genetics today couldn’t have been made without Mendel’s laws as the base we build upon
Albeit it is basic, it still basic enough that any normal person can understand it. It is how people use to breed certain animals to get certain traits without understanding the deep reasons for it. For example, Shrimp Breeding in the aquarium hobby etc.
Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur. One must be ready to ask questions. The first man to create nylon saw no use for it and dumped down the drain. The second man asked what can be done with this. As Asimov said, the most important words in science aren’t “what if”, but “Hmm, that’s funny…”
“Punnet squares” strike fear in me after AP Bio
The TV series? I started watching it for a second time but got pre-occupied again and haven't even finished the first season. 😉
"Luck" in this sense seems like common practice and anecdotal heritage. Ie, herbalism and native knowledge that shouldn't be overlooked
yeah it seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss his intuition as "luck"
It's luck that he lived or had access to a particular plant that follows this basic form of inheritance.
@@shawnsg you don't think that it was a blind guess, but educated by them who came before him? Cause, I mean, obviously. And as such stop invisiblizing the common wisdom for some pale-face science-guy who INVENTED genes. It wasn't luck, it was farmers and cultivators and agriculture birthed from husbandry shared by old-wives for thousands--thats right--thousands of years. That he had access bc of luck is like saying you're lucky to have access to electricity. True enough but way beyond the bucket. Not relevant.
Instead of claiming (without evidence) that he "might have gotten lucky OR lied," you could theorize that perhaps he knew *exactly* what he was doing and picked a research subject that had a limited number of consistently differing traits so that he could remove extraneous variables.
Nah. Couldn't be...
Read somewhere he was originally breeding rats but had to pick something else when other monks in the monastery started complaining about his test subjects.
I guess it's not just the stench but that he's observing them getting it on that grossed out his collegues.
They're just suggesting he might have lied given how precise some of his results were considering what we know now. And maybe it's not true, but worth mentioning.
He definitely got lucky by deciding to study peas. He studied many plants, but by having peas he could actually draw the relevant conclusions. Claiming Mendel might have lied, simply due to the precision of pea results, seems yellow journalistic, but that just means his results were lucky.
He probably ran a lot of experiments, and only published the one that agreed with his theory (silently discarding data that did not agree with it as outliers or failed experiments) - this was a common occurrence back when cross-analysis was not a thing anyone cared about.
And he probably talked to farmers who were involved in selection and likely noticed some of the patterns before he did - or at least that they stay consistent. He just never credited any of them - again as it was common back then...
This is exactly what I was thinking. Not so much luck, but that he chose an organism to study that already fit his hypothesis.
It's still common today. Clinical studies that don't prove a medication works are often not published by the companies doing them.
@@ooooneeee very true
Wow, that is a lot of speculation and conspiracy
@@poldertalk Yes but I believe it's a reasonable and plausible guess. It is what I would have probably done if I was in his place back then. It may seem scandalous now but was within expectations of the era.
You guys are my favorite comfort channels :)))))
Next up: Alexander Fleming was lucky, Percy Spencer was lucky, hell half the major scientific advances came from luck
Mendel took records of all the plants in his garden, he didn't get lucky he just had a large sample size
Luck usually plays a vital role in one's achievements. This is what I learnt the hard way over the years of my life.
A dose of SciShow to remind me of my biologist background and keep up my hopes of one day return to my studies, love this channel, if one day I go back to teaching I might use some of your videos haha (after translating to portuguese of course)
are you currently pursuing jobs ?
@@ishana6038 no, right now I work with IT assistance, which is something I like but the pay sucks, also too many unpaid overtime work, as I teacher at least the pay is slightly better and a bit less unpaid overtime work
@@evandrochaves9596 yaa . .. teaching is nice ...plus you also get to be in touch with your fav subject ...hopefully, you'll be a teacher soon 👍
Mendel was one of those brilliant obsessive people that moves society forward.
Holy Buzzfeed Clickbait! At least this joke was short.
I used Mendel's theory all the time, so I'm super excited to watch this! I breed snakes and we calculate a TON of different things with this method! Though, as mentioned, there are many exceptions to the rule... but for the most part it works for what i need!
Sam Kean’s book, “The Violinist Thumb”, is about genes and genetics. I’m learning about the scientists behind the science and things I wish I’d known back in my college genetics class.
I like your funny word magic man
Maybe working with peas gave him the inspiration to look into this matter further, something he might not have done with other organisms. The peas chose him. :D
If you are going to accuse a person of lying then it would be nice if you could substantiate the claim more.
thought the same, somewhat unfair to have it in the title but not in the video itself.. cause that's what's gonna stick in your mind even if it's wrong after all..
That’s clickbait for ya.
For every lucky scientist there are numerous unlucky ones who's names are long forgotten.
"What is life?" That's the hardest question I've ever heard!
I mean, it sure looks lucky when you focus on the one success story, sure.
He's the one successful scientist studying it at the time. We don't pay attention to the thousands of other naturalists of his time who weren't studying the right plant and hadn't made this discovery.
Doesn't it look like bad luck if you look at the others?
Lol the labwork involved with knocking out, freezing, and thawing flies for fly studies. Oh, and also the timing.
Is it possible he selected peas because they seem to have more straight forward genetics?
Nah, because when he chose them concept of genetics did not even exist. He wroked with purebred lines. And then he established 'genetics'
Mendel studied many plants. Among them peas were the easiest to analyze. Their gene patterns were simple enough for him to understand after observation, so he could actually draw conclusions. We don’t hear about his other plants, likely because their patterns were to complex to be neatly categorized and he had difficulty observing them to the same extent as peas.
Mendel figured it out in a Monastery with BOX OF SCRAPS!.... i mean seeds.
Mendel was not lucky. He studied peas for a long time before he chose which traits to follow. You give the impression that scientists sit down, do one experiment, write up the paper, and become rich and famous. Most experiments for research scientists result in failure. It is only after many experiments and many years of hard work do they get publishable results.
The luck in this case was among the plants he studied there were peas.
@@dex6316 He only published the results of peas. Whether he studied other plants is unknown.
... he didnt "choose" to study peas. he NOTICED something peculiar and then wrote it down, and observed the patterns associated with some traits. it noticed something an studied it he didnt just say "oh man im going to study a plant that i have no reason to pay attention to" so like most discoveries in new fields of study it was luck and being curious.
I have read Mendel's original paper on pea genetics and he was way smarter than the average. He made a conscious choice to breed peas because they were easy to work with and a large body of work by pea breeders was available to provide consistent, unmixed supply of packets of specific peas to work with. They were commercially important, so the pea breeders before him could supply ideas and a practical starting point.
I thought Mendel lived back in medieval times. Mind blown that he was in 1800s
I wonder if it’s because he was a friar in an abbey, and their dress code hadn’t changed much in the 500 years prior :P
@@diggoran Their glasses had though.
Maybe it wasn't like "Oh well, time to study genetics. Lets pick peas" but instead he was already working with peas and noticed the pattern (because it was so clear in this case) and studied it. So it wasn't luck at all. It was the peas that triggered the study in the first place.
Our teacher calls him "The Nerdy Abbott"
This Year I Decided To Attempt Crossing Pinto Beans With Black Beans, Got A Blinto Bean.
I still think that labeling Mendel's choice as "lucky pick" is simplistic, because he probably didn't discover this phenomenon using peas on the first place. it's known fact that Mendel was initially conducting experiments on small mammals before his church ruled it to be immoral. Mendel was likely aware of the pattern long before his research on peas and just used this plant because it was a good example.
mendel and charles darwin could've shared ideas, but the person who told mendel that he would publish mendel's work for him, but that guy was a fellow religous person who purposely put it somewhere that it would never be found. we could be 100 years ahead in genetics and evolution if it wasn't for that. ironically, thank god that some (I think grad students) found his work.
God had nothing to do with finding his work, but everything with why it was hidden.
@@kellydalstok8900 damn true, I mean at least his followers
Nice flower genetics.
I wish this video went into some of the actual info that people are using to claim he was "massaging the data". That was why I clicked on this video and now I'm just left with the question "was he?"
Read somewhere that it really went down to some luck. He was originally breeding rats but his superiors in the monastery finally had enough of the stench that they forced him to pick something else to study. And so he ended up with peas.
Breeding rats sounds very difficult. Peas seem like such a perfect choice in retrospect.
@@Carlos-ln8fd true. Had he kept with rats and mice he might have never discovered what he did with peas.
Maybe he should’ve changed the bedding more frequently.
Love your vids!
Mendel squares 🤣🤣
1:46 “flavour” is questionable word choice for that… Stefan I’d like to inquire about your diet.
It's a bit silly to say he lied when his data is repeatable.
I'm a bit disappointed that there was no more than a single comment on that item. Analysis of his data match the outcomes a bit too well. One would expect a bit more variability in "real" data. Now, it is still possible that he was lucky in his data as well as his subject matter.
The key to understand is those suggesting the data might be edited to prove the hypothesis are not saying he was wrong. In the case of binary and independent genes, his principles are valid, and that has been proven over and over again since his time.
Others have suggested that he selected the organism and the traits as they seemed to have a clear pattern. He then investigated that pattern until he could better understand how the traits combined.
I'm sure he was not the first to see patterns in inheritance, but he is the first to document his theory and provide data to back it up.
That's a false assumption. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
@@YeOldeTraveller Confirmation Bias is often an Unmentioned/Ignored Flaw in many Scientific Research Studies. Isaac Asimov in his Autobiography mention he almost failed Biochemistry for reporting all his results and refusing to leave out data points that did not agree with the results expected by the baseline hypothesis.
Mendel was a biologist long before he studied peas. He became a monk so he could be taught by the best biologists of the time.
Gregor was lucky is another way of saying that Gregor was observant, intelligent, and correct.
Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
Mendel published his paper without pea review.
😂
No, he all the time in the world to mess around with the plants at the monastery. He started noticing some patterns, and the rest is history!
I like to believe that great scientists get to see to results of their labors when they die
That chromosome part reminded me how people who have Down syndrome have a unique look to them, because their chromosomes are different. For some reason it was mind blowing to me even though I already knew genes affect how you look.
And that's just one extra chromosome. Science is wild
it was either luck, or super carefully chosen traits ...
Another example of luckily choosing the right model is the characterization of RNAi in C elegans! The founder of the nematode as a model system Dr Sydney Brenner, initially planned to use a close relative C briggsea instead. However, C briggsea cannot do systemic RNAi in the same way C elegans can. So if he’d chosen the other way we might still be working out cosupression!
"What is _life?_ " That is not an easy question! We still even today have trouble defining it and drawing the line clear between life and non-life!
I love learning about genetics, since I have a genetic disorder, I feel like I need to know EVERYTHING about genetics and what went “wrong” with my deletion genetic disorder
Most likely, he tracked a ton of traits and those were the only traits that he was able to definitively say weren't linked (and could find a pattern for).
I grew up raising silk worms as a family hobby. Think of it as an annual, short-term, recurring pet. A few years into it, we decided to perform genetic experiments and did selective breeding by color. After a few years, we had produced fully colorless worms. Unfortunately, they also ended up with birth defects! Missing half segments of their body was the most visible issue. It was interesting to watch happen as a kid in elementary school.
That's an interesting case of "independent assortment" not applying. A commonly known example among snake hobbyists is "spider" ball pythons. "Spider" is a pattern in the snake's coloration that cropped up by random mutation and was then bred for, but is apparently linked to motor issues, known as "spider wobble" that occur with varying severity.
I think some people are missing the point. Also, part of this is going to be subjective on what all you consider luck.
_maybe he had intuition about peas from raising them_
He didn't just randomly go out in the garden and notice something and decide to figure it out. Dominant and recessive traits are already known. Mendel went to school that was known for hereditary work. He had a close acquaintance that was interested in plants. He apparently owned a book called "Experiments and Observations upon Hybridization in the Plant Kingdom" that included peas.
_he bred other plants and animals_
Yeah and think how lucky he was that of the 400,000 plant species world wide he had one that followed this very basic hereditary model.
He's also lucky because the traits he chose are ones that are independent and fit his model which is obvious in hindsight but imagine all the different variables he could have chosen and he happened to choose the 7 best.
I don't think anyone is implying he didn't work hard, but it's irrational to assume luck didn't play a role.
Wait a minute, this is the thing I saw Kyle Hill shared a meme about earlier today!
It's almost like there is some Grand Design.
Wait wait, I get this is an ad and all, but “what is life” is far from a simple question, lol
I have another question and I'm not sure if you already have a video on this: how would the sorld change if gravity was 1% stronger or weaker? How about 10%? How would animals develop (denser bones or rather lighter, would the joints degenerate sooner/slower? Would we live longer bc the cardiovascular system has to work less against gravity if there was less gravity to overcome?...) just had this thought and wondered if more gravity would be great for training our body just with daily tasks vut then thought that our joints wouldn't be able to take it for long...
This is weird question and I am not sure it will be answered because neither you nor anyone else is in position to change the gravity a single bit. And no one knows the material system hiding behind gravity (by the way Einstein was definitely wrong with gravity).
It is the same kind of question like when you ask what would happen if humans have two heads (and two brains), four legs or even wings to fly. All this is possible but not always meaningful.
You should be more interested about evolution and how it works in detail. Biology will not explain it to you as I show in my videos.
@@Dr.Z.Moravcik-inventor-of-AGI thank you for the insight. I am indeed interested in biology and am currently studying medicine :) if fact thinking about factors impacting the cardiovascular system and therefore limiting life expectancy led me to this thought. Other areas of knowledge are also fascinating so I‘m happy to keep learning. Yes, „what if“ questions might not really help with anything other than to entertain me
@@katharinafeustel5864 Sure I know what you mean. Most of the medical doctors rely on biology which is of no use if you want to understand human body perfectly. Body is only molecules ordered in space & time which is chemistry and molecules on atomic level is physics and so on. Making biologists talk about it is just waste of time.
Answer to your question is that changing the gravity would require tremendous amount of change of human body structure (both anatomy and physiology). You would need to rebuild the body like when you want a car to suddenly float on the water. If increasing gravity about 10% means that instead of 100kg you would weigh 110kg, then your body could probably cope with it (like women usually weigh substantially less, like for example 55kg instead of 50kg is no problem for human body). This is no evolution but adaption capability of human body. Most of the structures of human body have adaption capability, which means that they can adapt to changes. Like for example your body height adapted to sudden changes in recent past and humans are bigger now (they say it was caused by increased sugar intake and better nutrition in general). So cardiovascular system and bones certainly can adapt as well (just think about what physical training /which is also a sudden change/ can do with human body).
Also when your cardiovascular system develops new ramifications of arteries, veins and capillaries, it is no evolution (they usually call this phenomena wrongly 'microevolution') but it is only adaption of human body to changes.
Unfortunately adaption of human body has its LIMITS and when they are reached it is like I have written. Rebuilding of the whole body is needed. Then we should start talking about evolution. Like for example when your body height should increase to 4-5 meters, then most of your systems in your body would stop working correctly and all of the human anatomy and physiology would require a rebuild.
It makes me wonder what would have happened if Mendel and Darwin ended up in a room together (assuming they could both communicate in a common language, like Latin). Or if they happened to correspond with each other. Darwin was only 13 years older than Mendel, and they died 2 years apart, so it would have been quite feasible for them to have met or read about each other - if they had been in the same circles. In some ways, their fields complement each other: Mendel's ideas of inheritance would've explained how traits are inherited, giving Darwin's ideas of evolution by natural selection a firmer base.
Well, Mendel was fairly set in one spot at that monastery, so maybe if Darwin had decided to visit one day? Based on Darwin's relationship with Christianity at the time, with his ideas being new and all, it might have been very possible that Mendel wouldn't have liked what Darwin had to say 😂
@@johnhoelzeman6683 Possibly! I think it might be more realistic that Mendel could conceivably come across some of Darwin's writings on evolution, and co-opt those ideas to complete his explanation of inheritance and look at the bigger picture.
He started what was basically the best organism to demonstrate genetics...by luck
as a cat breeder I have to say that those rules do not have exceptions. as in you never get a red cat out if both parents don't have red, you don't get a white cat unless at least one of the parents is white, breeding white+white is outlawed (at least in europe) because this guarantees higher percentage of white kittens but most would be unviable etc. (same is possible with crops if you want to count them - some pairings do promise a higher outcome mathematically but it might be unviable as well and last only a couple of days according to the same law). but it is as unbreakable as it gets. another thing altogether is that far from all features are set on just one allele. some features are like one note, others are like a full moonlight sonata.
also something 'linked' can become unlinked over time. for example about 20 years ago in my breed chocolate coat color was linked with copper eye color (while breed standard requires green). years of selection changed that. if population is huge this link can be present in only one family or line of a subject. or maybe in all but one. this link is just a link, it has to do with the dna chain structure, not the mendelian law itself. also there exist more or less regular genetic mutations that can look like the law isn't perfect until you don't know better. so considering all I know about the subject matter over about 20 years of my own work +communication with colleagues I have NOT seen a single case when the law was untrue.
In the sponsor message "answer the easy questions like 'what is life?'... Um yeah, okay. Doesn't sound that easy to me. lol
Luck could also be related to other failed experiments by himself or others. We generally only talk about the things that worked
Very cool
I think when one hobbyist discovers a completely unknown aspect of the world, one that is alien to both their training and profession, some imprecision can be expected and forgiven. :)
There was still observation. Mendel originally looked at more traits, but discarded those which appeared to be linked. He finally chose the 7 traits. It wasn't just luck that these coincided with the 7 (n=7) chromosomes his peas had. In some ways he was predating use use of Morgans.
He chose to report only on the behavior of unlinked, single gene phenotypes. Lucky that he got away with it long enough to establish the importance of those findings until the more complicated cases of inheritance could be explained.
yeah exactly.
I mean, the choice of pea plants *was* pure dumb luck (it was what the monastery would let him experiment with), but he actually documented all sorts of traits. He just had absolutely no clue what to do with the ones that were more complicated so he solely focused on the things he *could* explain. He explained that in the preface to his paper.
I would guess that Gregor Mendel gardened to aid contemplation and, on a whim, decided to breed varieties of peas with a blend between blue and white. Failing that, he then tried to breed pure blue and white varieties. He would have quickly succeeded with a white variety but not a blue one. Even so, the number of white ones would quickly fall each generation.
Intrigued, he would then try cross-breeding the different colours. The fact that the next generation was all blue would be a big surprise, leading straight to his discovery.
He would also observe that other traits, such as plant height and smooth vs wrinkled skins, followed a similar pattern independent of flower colour.
The rest is history. It wasn't luck but careful observation.
Actually, the number of white ones would _not_ quickly fall each generation. That's one of the big misunderstanding of Mendelian genetics even today, with newspapers still printing "scientific" articles about things like "redheads are not going to exist in a few generations!". The actual number would instead quickly settle on a more or less fixed proportion, which is exactly the curious thing that underlines the "Huh, that's weird" that led into the development of genetics.
Before Mendel (and of course, still long after him chronologically), the general idea of inheritance was that children are the mix of their parents. What Mendel has shown was that this mixing is _not_ a simple averaging of traits, but rather, that it's quantum, granular. And along with that was the discovery (or perhaps better said, a better explanation) of recessive traits - which can be transferred in the offspring _without_ showing up on the offspring. Of course, the phenomenon itself was noticed before - it was known that sometimes, traits seem to "skip" a generation or two. But Mendel's data made it very clear that this is a very regular, though also random, mechanism. While you can never tell exactly which children will display which traits, you _can_ know how many of each there will be, on average.
Sometimes, the difference is not obvious. Today we know that this is because a) genes can share the same chromosome, and chromosomes cross over and b) some traits are actually caused by an interplay of many different genes. A child of a small parent and a tall parent will most often be intermediate height (all else equal), _but_ - it can also be even smaller, or even taller.
Interesting take
I have to wonder how much of those accusitions that he lied are not because he actually lied, but because they hate the fact that he was a Catholic monk & they want to ruin his reputation.
2:14 sometimes traits can be linked
Science is a process of taking the complexity of reality and reducing it to a form which can fit into a human brain, not necessarily mine, but hopefully yours. (Storytelling is another.) At some point, the process of abstraction or simplification takes place. It is now considered best to perform this simplification in the most public and honest way as possible. But this, too, is something that needed to be learned.
It is said that the initial idea of vaccination - people that had cowpox did not get smallpox - was based on observations of common people. The guy just properly tested it scientifically.
There were quite a few pea farmers out there. Farming is all about selective breeding. Mendel picked a case where the rules were simple from others experience, to get a good baseline. Leaving the harder cases for those after him (or his later attempts).
I thought that he had died unknown until some one find his work... kind of like half a Van Goth of science and other half a introverted Tesla
One day people will be saying we got lucky
I am not even mad if he smudged the numbers
sci show goated
Well, it's not the first time I've heard Mendel's work was possibly based on more than luck. I've heard some refer to him as "the golden spoon" (as in cherry-picker) aside from the father of genetics.
Mendel, the Mengele of peas.
Perhaps Mendel looked at dozens of traits and only wrote about the ones that could be explained by particle theory of inheritance and simple algebra. As for the linked traits and other traits (incompletely dominant, etc) he just left them out...
4:48 or you could say that Mendel pea'd so that others could (fruit) fly.
Why are scientists thinking he lied? If it's so easy to see heritage in a certain pea species it makes sense for someone breeding that species to form the heritage hypothesis
I posted a comment literally about exactly this on Kyle Hill’s meme of Mendel yesterday. Am I in a simulation?