I’m preparing to teach genetics again, and as usual, I’m trying to rework some of the lectures, because I don’t care to say the same thing every year. I had one odd thought that I’m probably not going to squeeze into the lectures this year, but thought I’d bounce it off people here.
Evolution and genetics were on parallel tracks in this very interesting period of 1860-1910. While the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War might have been distracting most people, biologists had their own obsessions. Charles Darwin published in 1859; Gregor Mendel in 1863. Darwin had immediate popular success, while Mendel was basically ignored and neglected. I was contemplating why the difference was there, and had a random idea.
Darwin started with a phenomenological and largely descriptive foundation, no significant math anywhere in The Origin. Mendel’s brief paper was little more than a mathematical hypothesis, with limited qualitative description — it was just peas, one model system, and the traits weren’t even particularly interesting, except for the fact that their inheritance was so discrete.
Evolution took off fast, and rather erratically. There were so many bad hypotheses built on the framework of natural selection (for instance, all of Haeckel’s work) that by the end of the 19th century, Darwinism (and in this case, that was an appropriate name for it) was fading, and people were finding flaws and poking holes in the idea. The absence of a quantitative basis for analysis was killing evolutionary theory.
Meanwhile, Mendel’s laws of inheritance weren’t getting any attention, but there was all this foundational qualitative work getting done — cell theory was being established, microscopy was taking off (instruments were reaching the physical limits of optics), Weismann had worked out the limitations of cellular inheritance, Sutton and others were publishing all this tantalizing stuff about chromosomes. When 1900 rolled around and Mendel was rediscovered, everyone was primed for his statistical/probabilistic theory of inheritance. We could do math on it!
Also, evolution was rescued by it’s happy marriage to genetics and in particular, population genetics. We could do math on evolution, too!
Everything is better with mathematics, is my conclusion. Except maybe individual success — before 1900, someone could come up with a hot theory and get it named after themselves. Afterwards, there’s too much detailed quantitative thinking going on for any one person, and eponymous theories went out of style, being regarded with suspicion, even.
Along comes SMBC to correct me:
OK, OK, it’s not just mathematics, it’s thinking precisely. But isn’t that what math is? How do you think precisely without the application of math and statistics and quantitative reasoning?
The real key thought to get out of the SMBC cartoon above is that it is quite frequently math abuse to apply math to imprecise things. We’d greatly mitigate the techbro / libertarian douchebag / nazi atheist problem if we could get miscreants to understand this.
I think it is more that science deals with discrete observations that then require a continuous relationship to explain as a phenomenon. Math simply provides a fundamental relationship that gives a continuous means of organizing the discrete observations so they can be predicted.
There is also a huge difference in the circumstances of the two men. By 1860 Darwin had been a member of the Royal Society for more than 20 years, having been elected at 29. He was the author of a long series of well received natural history books based on his time on the Beagle and observations in Britain, on topics from coral atolls to worms. Mendel was a studious monk who had failed his exams to become a high school teacher and published his work in a local science society journal. His religious duties increased after he became abbot of the monastery interrupting any followup research. It is entirely possible that no one capable of understanding the importance of his discovery ever saw his paper while Darwin already had an influential audience waiting for his next publication.
Did Mendel publish his findings in English or German?
Going further than John Watts #4
Mathematics is in many ways its own language. Philosophers often talk about how natural languages suck because they are ambiguous and sloppily grammared etc. and try to create new ones. They fail. The Klingon-language does not fail. Because in order to do the main survival thing for humans, you need the slop. People grow up learning to communicate that way in which there are five definitions for a word that sounds like ‘right’ (rite, wright).
People who think precisely -and these are not philosophers- do math and suddenly there’s new symbology that always means the same thing all the time. If you’re brain is not set to understand a new code-system this is a challenge. If it is, it is a lesser one. But that’s the thing: talking precisely to people gets you into godsdamned trouble. Science requires standing on the shoulders of giants, so you need to talk so other people will listen. Surviving day-to-day involves going to the grocery store and not getting your head chopped off by someone who’s better at swinging (hopefully) metaphorical swords at you than you can sharply talk.
Of course Mendel got ignored.
German. That shouldn’t be a factor, though, since German science was esteemed.
@John Watts #4:
German. While that was the commonly used language for scientific communication in Northern Europe at the time, it does seem unlikely that a journal published in a distant, small regional capital ever made its way to the Royal Society or to any of the major British universities. Even as Darwin’s ideas spread in the 1860s and 70s no-one in Brno seems to have considered a connection with Mendel’s work, and as time went on it was increasingly less likely that anyone who had read it would remember it.
I’ve become known as the language police in several companies–imprecise, “we all know what we mean”, language has caused too many production delays. It is particularly bad in biotech where multiple domains have to come together–and while it is usually clear whether we are talking about the pathologist’s “sample”, the instrument manufacturer’s “sample”, or the statistician’s “sample”, that isn’t always true.
More than once I’ve seen heated arguments come to quick and amicable resolution once those involved realized they weren’t actually talking about the same problem.
Evolution was something that had been debated long before Darwin and Wallace came up with natural selection and sexual selection. Everyone knew evolution was occurring but was puzzled over the exact mechanism. Part of the key to that puzzle was discovery of geology of the immense age of the planet. Mendel was doing something new and was not well known in the evolution debate, and was published in an obscure journal.