Gregor mendel experiments

Gregor Mendel and the History of Heredity1 Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Exeter, sewm201@ex.ac.uk 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 rece