Happy Birthday Gregor Mendel-the Christian monk who founded the science of genetics

I am sure Google won't mind me posting this doodle in celebration of the monk with the peas or pasting a bit from them celebrating the great, but humble, man.

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Had it not been for a bunch of peas on the Google homepage, chances are you wouldn't have even heard of Gregor Mendel least of all remember his (189th) birthday.

Mendel as google will tell you was an Austrian botanist and monk and is considered as the father of genetics.

Mendel was born Johann in Heinzendorf, Austria (it is presently part of the Czech Pepublic) and got the name Gregor after he joined a monastery of the Augustinian order.

In Vienna, he studied physics and mathematics as also the anatomy and physiology of plants.

It was however in a monastery in Brunn that he began his experiments with plant hybridisation with the pea plant.

His findings enabled him to formulate the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. These laws would later be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Soon after he turned his attention to honeybees and even as his peers and contemporaries were less than welcoming of his work, Mendel himself did little or nothing to publicise his works.

Further his responsibilities in the order left him little or no time to pursue his scientific goals.

On January 6, 1884 Mendel died aged 61, his work largely gone unrecognised.

The following century however was more kind and his work got the recognition it truly deserved and Mendel was acknowledged as the father of genetics.

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Thankfully, nobody had told Gregor Mendel that science and religion were supposed to be eternal opposites, enemies locked in a death struggle which only one could win. In fact, this doctrine is quite recent. And evidently false, at least in the case of the Christian faith which rests on sound historical foundations including multiple fulfilled prophecies, miracles and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Many great scientists have seen no contraditions between a deeply held traditional Christian faith and honest empirical science.

It has been suggested (I say no more that that) that Mendel's work was hushed up during Darwin's lifetime as it was not at all supportive of Darwinianism, which a powerful anti-Christian movement wanted to foist on the world despite the lack of evidence. Mendelian inheritance is a good model for understanding allele frequency variability, which fits in well with Darwin's actual observations concerning variations and natural selection, but also demonstrates predictable limits on variation, which is very bad for Darwin's imagined common descent. Darwin's observations were often very good, its his conclusions which were rubbish. Unlike Mendel, he allowed his imagination to run away with him and made conclusions which ran way beyond his evidence. Also, unlike Mendel, he had a powerful movement (including many revolutionaries and atheists) who wanted his theory to be true.

Anything which demonstrates limits to variation is not good for Darwinism, which depends on the belief that variation is unlimited. Mendels peas remained peas. Darwin's speculation that variations could add up to eventually produce entirely different plants and animals is not supported by empirical observation, which shows clear limits to the varaibility seen within species. Dogs always dogs, grass always grass, carp always carp, and so on.

Happy birthday Gregor. See you.