this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mendel wanted to do his experiments with rats but the church didn't gave him enough money and support so he had to use peas. Rats genetics are way more complex that peas and it would be hard for him to get to any meaningful results using them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What does this have to do with what you said?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I used https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NgGLFozNM2o and did a ctl+F for "Mendel," and there's nothing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I remember learning about that in that video, if isn't there then it could be in the podcast "History of philosophy without any gaps" but no idea in what episode.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

We need more history memes

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Sshhh, don’t tell anyone the church was a patron of the sciences. Ruins the narrative.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Scientist: we discovered this thanks to your funding

Church: Nice, now shut the fuck up, you are gonna ruin the racket.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Was. They didn't like what they found though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

DAE SIENCE ONLY ATEIST CLUB?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

RELEASE THE SQUARE

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Here is a paper that goes into the anomalies in Mendel's data found by Fisher: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6823958/

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago

I’m going to simplify things a bit.

Darwin articulated the theory of evolution by natural selection.

It goes like this:

  1. Individuals in a community vary in their physical properties. Some may be larger or smaller, faster, stronger, or smarter.
  2. This variability can affect the chances for those individuals possessing more favorable characteristics to survive and reproduce better than the other variants.
  3. If those physical properties are inherited, then the ones who reproduce more leads to having the next generation of their population having more individuals with that property.

What it boils down to is that evolution is the change in the gene pool of a population over time. Natural selection was the term coined to mean that nature breeds animals and plants just like farmers do - it chooses based on the characteristics it “wants” - by which I mean the ones who survive and reproduce more successfully.

So far, so good.

The problem is that while Darwin was working that out, biology still held to a model that we call “blending inheritance.” They knew that offspring could inherit traits from both parents, and they thought the result was a blend of the two - a short person having a kid with a tall person would produce a medium sized kid, and so on.

Blending is completely incompatible with Darwin’s theory, and he worked really hard to fit that square peg into the round hole. He never did.

The irony is that during this same period Mendel was doing breeding experiments on pea plants, crossing tall with short, or different colors of flowers, and so on. He demonstrated that inheritance is particulate. Rather than a blend, it was a random mixture of alternate individual genes that caused the variety in the offspring. Basically, if you cross a plant with wrinkled peas with one with smooth peas, half the offspring will be wrinkled and half smooth. You don’t wind up with plants that had semi-wrinkled peas or which have a mixture of both. Unfortunately for Darwin, Mendel’s work remained undiscovered for decades. (I’m not sure whether wrinkled is actually a 50/50 or not, I’m just using that as an illustration).

It wasn’t until the 1940s that the two biggest ideas in biology were brought together in what’s called the modern synthesis. That’s where we began what could be considered modern evolutionary biology.

Mendel was extremely fortunate to have been working with plants that showed dominant and regressive characteristics so clearly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure we were doing punnett squares in year 10 here in NZ.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

We covered Mendel and Punnett squares in 9th grade biology here in the midwest US

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Another issue that Darwin had is that for the theory of evolution to work you need very long periods of time.

The problem is that it has been proved by the physicist William Thomson using cold hard maths that the earth cannot be older that few hundreds millions years, which is not compatible with Darwin's theory.

History told us that Darwin was right and Thomson wrong but it did not appeared this way at the time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It should also be noted that huge parts of the Church also rejected William Thomson's age calculations for the Earth. Even though he massively underestimated its age, the Church asserted that the Earth was even younger.