Earlier appreciation of Mendel's work

Living in Exile

I've got a genetics test tomorrow morning so instead of studying, I'm on ah.com. :p But it's got me thinking, what would happen to the field of biology if Gregor Mendel's work was 'discovered' within his own time? I've heard it said that Mendel's paper was in Darwin's library when Darwin died, apparently never read. As a POD, let's say Darwin chances across Mendel's work and sees the importance of it, and uses his own clout to publicize Mendel's work, within Mendel's own lifetime. How does this change things?
 

John Fredrick Parker

Donor
UIAM, a big reason Mendel remained obscure IOTL was being overshadowed by Darwin; so if Darwin doesn't publish Origin until after his death (which is easy enough to achieve), this could give you the POD you're looking for.
 

Mostlyharmless

If Darwin had read Mendel's article, he would have been hugely excited because it would have solved one of his greatest problems. In the Origin of the Species, he has to devote a great deal of space to human breeding of animals to establish that selection works. At the time, the ideas of genetics suggested that you had a merging of characteristics and a regression to the mean (for example, when comparing peoples heights to their parents). Thus it was hard for Darwin to show that selection in a large population could, for example, make giraffe's necks longer (except that similar things clearly could be done with dogs etc.).

The consequence is that evolution is an even more compelling story as soon as Mendel's work is added. How having an abbot as one of the founders changes how evolution is viewed, I will leave to the experts:).
 

Mostlyharmless

Firstly, I hope that Living in Exile had no trouble with his test.

Secondly, as no one has stepped forward, I shall have to think about the implications. One issue is that both Darwin and Mendel were quite intelligent. Thus it is possible that a collaboration, even at a distance by letter, might generate some surprising ideas.

Darwin believed that evolution was a natural process without some predetermined direction or end point. Had he received Mendel's article in 1866 when it was published (we only know that it was amongst his papers unread at his death) and immediately read and understood it, it seems very likely that he would have both replied to Mendel and drawn the attention of other biologists to Mendel's discovery.

Would either of them have made the further jump to the idea that what was selected by evolution was the gene? If they had, would it have distanced Darwin from the idea of “the survival of the fittest” and replaced it with some idea such as the selfish gene?

Might that have removed some of the pseudo-scientific gloss from Social Darwinism? As the effects of such ideas were mostly seen in the Twentieth Century, perhaps this has been placed in the correct forum after all.
 
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