WI: Gregor Mendel- Genius in his own Time

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who is known as the "father of modern genetics." The problem is that his work, done in the 1860's, was only rediscovered in the 20th century. During his own lifetime it was little known, and no further work was done on genetics until the early 20th century, when his work was rediscovered. Mendel did no self-promotion, and once his discoveries were largely rejected, he did nothing to defend his work. He abandoned his work in 1868, and never returned to it.

So what if he is a self-promoter, who knows that has made a great and ground-breaking discovery? He promotes his discoveries, answers his critics, and keeps on working at his pea-plants. Due to his labors, genetics becomes a much wider known science, and widely debated, even accepted in some circles.

I've been trying to think of what the effects of this would be, and I'm sure that there will be real scientific breakthroughs happening well in advance of OTL. Another of my lines of thinking is that Darwin's discoveries
led to social darwinism. Mendel's discoveries could produce an equally ugly ism, but this one is based on actual evidence of breeding, rather than vague ideas of survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism + Eugenics + Genetics= scary ATL.

Thoughts?
 
i personaly think mendel would have been screwed...he was a monk:D

no ,really , he was.

I can see a excomunication winging its way to his monastry. as for the wider acceptance of genetics , i can see the potential and i suspect it would have spured more sociological debates around eugenics , but i doubt the technology existed to actually utilise this new knowledge. its even possible that Genetics could have ended up like evoloution , constantly being battered around by die hard creationists to the extenet that few biologists (still predominately christian at this time) would touch it and it would have to wait till the slightly more enlightened 20th century to be fully explored

Sir Scott
-playing god since 1988
 
Bright day
Wekk Řehoř Mednel was fundamentally wrong, most organisms don't function the way he described. He just provides the explanation for public.
 
Although not all that much work may be done, and Mendel himself may have had significant parts of his own work wrong, didn't Darwin himself advance the state of biology by his very public publishing and defense of his work? If Mendel follows this pattern, and perhaps strikes up a relationship with Darwin, could this start to change some minds? Darwin's theory alone makes sense. With genetics the rudimentary workings of how those traits are passed on will be known. Could this tip the balance into their favor?
 
Dzugashvili's "genetics" never comes into vogue, and all of those stupidly expensive and wasteful attempts at cryogenic freezing of people never happen.
 
Darwin published his work and defended it successfully. We still have difficulty accepting it, although we have no better scientific theory. I suspect that Mendel's work would have gone much the same way. Having proved that god did not personally design every human being, he would have had difficulty continuing his own experiments let alone getting anyone to repeat them. The public opinion against him would have been far too great. And, in reality, we probably would see trials like the Scope's Monkey Trial debunking the theory after his death and the rise of "god-centric" theories in the latter part of the 20th Century. It would simply become a nightmare comparable to the one that we see today in evolution. :(
 
Assumign he was, I'd say genetics mught be slightly farther along. But if the church excommunicated him, it might be hard to find outisde support.
 
Actually his work would be at the same time that German nationalism in particular, and European nationalisms in general are on the rise, and the idea of racial superiority and "supermen" was already being tossed around. I think that there would have been support from some university or eccentric prince in Germany to continue his work. If we have changed Mendel's personality enough to have made him more publicity seeking, then him dealing well with a very ugly break with the Church wouldn't be much more than a hand wave away. His wide dissemination of his genetic theory also would have probably started to get people's minds turning, and perhaps some other scientists whose work or thoughts may have been along the same lines pick Mendel's theory and run with it.
 
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