School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2022 Jun;93:39-46. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.12.012. Epub 2022 Mar 18.
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.
第一，他是“花园中的僧侣”，19 世纪中期在摩拉维亚进行的豌豆实验成为遗传学的起点；第二，尽管具有如此崇高的地位，但孟德尔报告的数据有些可疑，甚至可能是伪造的。尽管在 1900 年著名的“重新发现”他的工作后，几乎立即就有人意识到，从统计学的角度来看，孟德尔的数据好得令人难以置信，但直到 20 世纪 60 年代，这个问题才得到广泛讨论和激烈争论，原因不仅与冷战地缘政治有关，还与人们对科学客观性的传统担忧有关。了解我们所继承的这个问题的历史渊源，可以帮助我们将讨论转向更富有成效的方向，无论是在科学领域还是在历史编纂领域。
