Mendel's Dwarf (35 page)

By the time of publication, the Prussians had gone and the city of Brünn appeared peaceful again. More than that, it appeared unchanged. Once again the Lord Lieutenant had taken up his position in the city. Once more the Estates were meeting in the Landhaus. The Empire, that shambolic collection of German, Magyar, Slav, Italian, and Jew, had been left untouched. Its borders were entire. Once more the military bands played in the Augarten—Strauss they played, Strauss, Strauss, Strauss—for all the world as though the Imperial Army had not just been defeated in war.

It is one of the dangers of the historical perspective to mistake the momentous for the mundane. Nothing much had changed except that the balance of Middle Europe had been reset. Nothing much had changed except that the German people had stumbled incoherently—they could hardly be accused of efficiency in the matter—a further step toward the apocalypse. Nothing much had changed except that an unknown friar, shortly to be elected abbot, had discovered the mechanics of inheritance and had, all unbeknownst to himself, created a new science that was to be taken up by the
Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene
(the Society for Racial Hygiene) in 1905 and the Nazi Party two decades later. It was a science that would ultimately lead to the ovens of Auschwitz.

1
. Handyside et al.
Lancet
i: 347–49 (1989); Coutelle et al.
British Medical Journal
299: 22–24 (1989).

2
. Restriction enzyme
SfcI
.

3
.
Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden
, 1866. What would now be called polygenic inheritance: a brilliant further insight into genetic theory. This idea would quite escape the so-called rediscoverers of his work at the start of the twentieth century.

4
. Letters to Nägeli, July 1870 and September 1870.

5
. There is no competition. The other two are the Darwin-Wallace paper on evolution by means of natural selection, delivered to the Linnaean Society (1858); and the Crick-Watson letter to
Nature
on a suggested structure of DNA (
Nature
, 1953). There are no papers greater than these; on these hang all the law and the prophets.

M
endel cheated. Oh yes, that’s the story. Useful, isn’t it? The Stalinists, in their desperation to demonstrate that Mendelism was a fraud, nothing more than a capitalist-fascist plot, used this calumny to support their point of view: Mendel cheated, genetics is a lie, Lysenko is right, the environment is everything, man can be molded by his circumstances, the revolution will create a true socialist environment, and man will fit perfectly into the earthly paradise like a hand into a glove. And thus the great experiment of Communism finds justification for its view and millions have to die before everyone (well, the majority at least) tumbles to the fact that the evidence is now stacked against the hypothesis of an earthly paradise and the great experiment can be brought to a close.

Mendel cheated.

But it was not some Soviet toady laboring away in a genetics laboratory somewhere in Omsk or Tomsk who caught the great man out; it was Sir Ronald Fisher. I particularly like the use of the title—it makes the accusation so much more authoritative.
Sir
Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962), graduate in mathematics at Cambridge University, sometime professor of eugenics at London University.

Eugenics?
Does your mind stall? Do you feel shivers down your spine? Does the flesh on the back of your neck crawl? Oh yes—there was a professor of eugenics at London University. Fisher occupied the Galton Chair of Eugenics, founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin and first held by a brilliant racist called Karl Pearson (he of the chi-square test and the Pearson correlation coefficient, biologists and statisticians please note). There was a chair of eugenics at Cambridge as well, but the university had the decency to change the name of their department to plain
genetics
in 1943 when Fisher moved there; by that time, presumably, the stench from continental Europe was becoming unbearable. In London the senses cannot have been so acute: the title of the Galton Chair was not changed to plain “Genetics” until 1961.

So, Mendel cheated. The problem is, you see, his results were too good.

EXAMPLE:

F
₁
generation total: 1,064 pea plants; of which 787 tall and 277 dwarf.

Theoretical ratio 3:1. Actual ratio 2.84:1.

It is rather close, isn’t it? But that is not quite the point. You could toss a coin one hundred times and find that it came up heads forty-eight times and tails fifty-two times, and no one would be too surprised. But if you claimed that every time you repeated the experiment it came up similarly close to 50:50, people might start getting suspicious. The tall:dwarf values I have just quoted are almost the
worst
that Father Gregor found. His other experimental ratios are all as close or closer to the ideal 3:1.

2.96:1  3.01:1  2.95:1  3.15.1  2.82:1 3.14:1

There they are, the actual values. The problem with Mendel’s work is that time after time, repetition after repetition, his results were simply too close to the expected ratios. Expected by whom? By Mendel, of course. It was Sir Ronald Fisher who
showed that the probability that Mendel could come consistently so close to his expected ratios by pure chance was so small as to be negligible. Considering Mendel’s 3:1 ratios alone, the probability of his having got greater deviations from the expected ratios than he actually found is .95. In laymen’s terms, Mendel had a ninety-five-percent chance of getting
worse
results than he did. Put backwards, he had only a five-percent chance of getting as perfect a set of results as he did. Ergo, Mendel cheated. Putting all his known results together, the probability of his having got greater deviations from the expected ratios than he actually found is .99993. That means that he had a 99.993-percent chance of getting
worse
results than he did. Put backwards, he had only a .007-percent chance of getting as perfect a set of results as he did, which is no chance at all.

So, he cheated. Mendel spent a decade of his life on his breeding experiments on the garden pea, further tested the validity of his theories on
Antirrhinum, Matthiola, Fuchsia, Campanula
, and a further eighteen species, and, thanks to the idiot Nägeli,
wasted
God knows how much time on trying to repeat the work on
Hieracium
—and all the time he cheated.

The trouble is, he was right.

The ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
was published with an article on “Hybridisation” by G. J. Romanes. Romanes was one of the most devoted disciples of Charles Darwin, and had consulted the great man at length during the preparation of the article. Darwin recommended that he read W. O. Focke’s book
Die Pflanzenmischlinge
, and, moreover, he actually lent Romanes his own copy. This book, published in 1881, outlined Mendel’s work on
Pisum, Phaseolus
, and
Hieracium
, and also mentioned him in the historical section, which Darwin particularly recommended Romanes to read. Romanes duly researched and wrote the article, and the name G. Mendel duly appeared in the bibliography
Darwin’s copy of
Die Pflanzenmischlinge
was duly returned, the pages for the work on the
Papilionaceae
still uncut, as they remain today; which is doubly curious as one of those pages (110) also mentions Darwin’s own work with garden peas. Indeed, the references to Mendel and to Darwin are immediately adjacent to each other, the two names separated by “(
loc. cit
.)” and a period.

Who was it who said, “You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references”? Darwin didn’t check his references, and neither did Romanes. They cheated. And Darwin needed Mendel. Oh yes, indeed, Darwin
needed
Mendel. As far as he had any clear ideas about a matter that was of prime importance to his theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin believed in the blending theory of inheritance. That is, he held that offspring tend to be a
blend
of their parents’ characteristics.

The trouble is, he was wrong.

By logical extension of this blending theory, a species should show less and less variation over a number of generations. Any artist knows that if you take the whole spectrum of colored paints and solemnly mix them together in pairs, finally and inevitably you will end up with muddy brown. And any naturalist knows that this is not what happens with plants and animals. Like anyone else with eyes, Darwin looked around him and, rather than muddy brown, found a bewildering, dazzling range of variation within each species. He saw, to use the technical term, polymorphisms. So to account for this undeniable variety he further postulated a high degree of spontaneous variation—what we would now call mutation.

The trouble is, he was wrong again. A high mutation rate implies an instability in the genetic material, which in turn would mean that you couldn’t guarantee what you inherited from your parents. In such a case, natural selection simply wouldn’t occur because the genes selected in one generation wouldn’t necessarily be passed on to the next. By the time they got there, they would probably have mutated.

No, what Darwin
needed
was Mendel. And he recommended a book that referred to Mendel’s work (a total of fourteen separate citations), and Romanes even quoted Mendel in his bibliography, and neither of them verified the references.

In fact Mendel had already seen this difficulty of the blending theory in the
Origin of Species
and come to Darwin’s rescue—in his
Pisum
paper he points out that if you cross parents differing in seven pairs of characters and then you allow the hybrid offspring to self-fertilize, in the second generation you will have 2,187 different genetic constitutions. He even generalized the rule, in one of his most brilliant insights: if
n
designates the number of characteristic differences in two parental plants, then 3′ is the number of genetically different individuals produced in the second generation after self-fertilization. Assuming that all the character pairs show complete dominance, then 2′ is the number of different combinations of phenotypes that would occur. Thus, in the case of his seven pairs of characters, you would obtain 128 different phenotypic combinations. That’s where the variety that Darwin needed so desperately comes from, from a reshuffling and recombination of Father Gregor’s factors; and the full explanation is there in his original paper. And no one noticed.

Later, in response to criticism of this very weakness, Darwin moved toward a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
(1868—note the date; it was just two years after Mendel’s paper was published) he envisaged body cells shedding hereditary particles, called gemmules or pangenes, into the blood. These entirely fictitious things, these fabrications, were visualized by him as models of the cells from which they come. They subsequently assemble to form the sex cells and thereby get passed on to the next generation. But because they originate from body cells they may therefore be affected by whatever has happened to the parent cells. Thus the effects of the environment on the body cells will end up being inherited.

That’s Darwin.

The trouble is, he was wrong again. He also seemed unaware that this particular theory completely contradicted the blending theory. Of course, it is never difficult for human beings to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. Look how many believe in a merciful and loving God, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Oh no, contradictory beliefs are by no means
impossible;
but they’re not very scientific.