Radick, G (2022) Mendel the fraud? A social history of truth in genetics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 93. pp. 39-46. ISSN 0039-3681
Abstract
Two things about Gregor Mendel are common knowledge: first, that he was the “monk in the garden” whose experiments with peas in mid-nineteenth-century Moravia became the starting point for genetics; second, that, despite that exalted status, there is something fishy, maybe even fraudulent, about the data that Mendel reported. Although the notion that Mendel's numbers were, in statistical terms, too good to be true was well understood almost immediately after the famous “rediscovery” of his work in 1900, the problem became widely discussed and agonized over only from the 1960s, for reasons having as much to do with Cold War geopolitics as with traditional concerns about the objectivity of science. Appreciating the historical origins of the problem as we have inherited it can be a helpful step in shifting the discussion in more productive directions, scientific as well as historiographic.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. This is an author produced version of an article published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Leverhulme Trust MRF-2016-192 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 10 Mar 2022 15:51 |
Last Modified: | 18 Sep 2023 00:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.12.012 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:184529 |