(This article originally appeared in Experimental Inquiries, edited by H. E. Le Grand, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 137-166. It appears at MendelWeb, for non-commercial educational use only, with the kind permission of the author and Kluwer. Although you are welcome to download this text, please do not reproduce it without the permission of the author and Kluwer Academic Publishing.)
Copyright © 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
"In the experiments above described plants were used which differed only in one essential character."
(Mendel [1866], sect. 8, line 1)"Though his work makes it evident that such varieties may exist, it is very unlikely that Mendel could have had seven pairs of varieties such that the members of each pair differed from each other in only one considerable character."
(Bateson [1909], p. 350)"The quality of [Mendel's] experimental work is perhaps best shown by the fact that his experiments, and not those of his so-called rediscoverers, are the ones quoted in textbooks of biology and genetics."
(Corcos and Monaghan [1993], p. xvi)
When biologists, historians, and teachers and students of various subjects speak of the significance of Mendel, they may have different things in mind. They may be referring to the experimental results reported by Mendel in his paper of 1865, to the experimental techniques he reported and discussed, to the quantitative methods he used to analyze and draw inferences from his data, to his argument concerning the predictability of offspring forms, to the rhetorical structure of his paper, to the influence of Mendel's work on agriculturalists and biologists at the turn of the 20th century, and/or to the role assigned to Mendel in the history of classical and molecular genetics. While biologists and historians have continued to ascribe significance to Mendel's work, at least since 1900, there has been and remains a remarkable diversity of opinion concerning how to accurately describe that significance.
In his essay, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," the historian Jan Sapp discusses some of the different ways that Mendel's work has been interpreted by biologists and historians during the decades of the 20th century, particularly in light of the development of evolutionary theory, and he shows how the significance of Mendel's work has been contested and transformed. That this transformation has continued, with each new generation of scientists, historians and students, attests to the multiple roles played by a text such as Mendel's, which acquires significance in the practice and history of science not only because of what it claims, but because of what is claimed for and about it. Thus it is possible to see in Sapp's essay the role played both by Mendel's work and "Mendel's work" in the history of biology and genetics.
Sapp's essay also draws attention to Mendel's paper as a cultural artifact, as a text full of rhetorical peculiarities, in need of interpretation no matter how strong its claims to transparency. While much has been written about whether Mendel accurately reported the findings of actual experiments -- Fisher [1936] is perhaps the best known example -- Sapp's essay makes clear that the controversy needs to be grounded in studies of how scientific papers in a given field are constructed, the relations they bear to experimental practice, and how they come to have the status of knowledge within that field. The ways that experimental work is crafted or encoded into the text of the scientific paper, and the ways that scientists then decode these texts, is a fascinating, if poorly understood, subject. It may seem odd, for example, that scientists (whether geneticists or astrophysicists), knowing the standard rhetorical techniques used to construct journal articles in their fields, would nevertheless read the articles of others as reports, as texts that convey information primarily about experimental (rather than literary) technique, and physical (rather than linguistic) objects. Yet this seems to be what happens in the practice of experimental science, and perhaps it is this attitude, this belief that the text points outward (to the world as well as to other articles), that distinguishes, at least for scientists, the scientific paper.
I am most grateful to Jan Sapp for allowing his article to be made available at MendelWeb. When the "Essays and Commentary" section of MendelWeb was begun, it was actually with "Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel" in mind. It has been and remains my favorite article about Mendel, and I wish to thank Professor Sapp and Kluwer Academic Publishers for allowing the essay to enjoy a wider audience. Finally, my thanks to Luigi Bianchi, at York University, who pointed out a number of errors in the digital version of the text.
Copyright © 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
(This article originally appeared in Experimental Inquiries, edited by H. E. Le Grand, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 137-166. It appears at MendelWeb, for non-commercial educational use only, with the kind permission of the author and Kluwer. Although you are welcome to download this text, please do not reproduce it without the permission of the author and Kluwer Academic Publishing.)