Creation Station
Science and Technology
The Father of Genetic Science
by Jeanette Strong
Two, of the many, lies that evolutionists constantly tell is that a scientist must uncritically believe in evolution and that nothing in biology can be understood outside of the religion of evolution. Fortunately Gregor Mendel didn’t believe either one of these lies. The following is the story of one of the greatest Creationist scientists and how he discovered genetics and demonstrated the truth of what God told us in Genesis, that He created every organism "After their kind".
Imagine working for eight years on a scientific project, spending
thousands of hours preparing your data. You publish your work and the
whole scientific community ignores it. Strangely enough, this is what
happened to Gregor Mendel, now known as the Father of Genetic Science.
It wasn’t until 34 years after his work was originally published, 16
years after his death, that his work was rediscovered. It has since
become the basis for one of the most significant
branches of science.
Gregor Mendel was born in Heinzendorf, Austria (now part of the Czech
Republic) in 1822. In 1843, he entered the monastery of St. Thomas in
Brunn, Moravia and was ordained as a monk on August 6, 1847. His abbot,
Cyrill Napp, sent him to the University of Vienna in 1851 to study
science and math. After two years he returned to the monastery and
taught biology and physics for the next 14 years. After Abbot Napp died
on March 30, 1868, Mendel was elected abbot of the
monastery. He died in 1884.
Mendel began his experiments in breeding peas in 1854. Abbot Napp
supported Mendel’s work, and built a large greenhouse just for him to
use. Mendel spent the first two years breeding strains of the common
garden pea Pisum ; he wanted to make sure he had parent plants that
would breed true. His goal was to discover the laws that governed the
inheritance of specific traits. The leading theory at the time was that
offspring inherited a blending of traits, that specific traits were not
handed down unaltered, but that the parents’traits were blended
together to produce something new in the offspring.
Mendel’s work was very painstaking. After breeding the true parent
strains, he had to produce offspring whose inherited traits he could
trace. The pea plant he was working with had seven distinct
characteristics: (1) seed shape : angular [wrinkled] or round; (2) seed
color : green or yellow: (3) seed coat colo r: white or gray; (4) shape
of pod : smooth or bumpy; (5) color of unripe pod : green or yellow;
(6) location of flowers : tip of plant [terminal] or along whole stem
[axial]; and (7) height: tall or dwarf . Each of these traits is very
distinct and easy to see, so by using the pea plant, Mendel had picked
the perfect organism for his experiments.
In May of 1856, Mendel began his actual experiments. He first crossbred
the parent plants for shape - one parent with wrinkled seeds, one with
round seeds. Pea plants each contain both male and female parts. In
order to make sure he was crossbreeding only the plants he wished to,
and not contaminating his experiment, he went down one row of plants
and peeled open the buds to reveal the stamen, the male part of the
plant. He carefully removed the stamen, making the
plant female only, then covered each bud with a
little calico cap, to prevent it being disturbed. A few days later, he
took pollen from the male part of the plants from another row, and
fertilized the female plants. Using a paintbrush to do this, he moved a
few grains of pollen at a time from one plant to the other. He then
covered the pollenized plants with little calico caps. Mendel harvested
the resulting seeds, and prepared for the second generation of plants.
In 1857, he developed the routine he would follow for the next several
years: plant the seeds, fertilize the plants, harvest, and count the
offspring. Mendel first had to harvest the pods and put them in bags,
making a note of which row and plant they came from. He then popped
open the pods, classifying the traits of each seed, noting which plants
they came from and replacing them in their bags. The first year he
counted more than 7000 peas, classifying each one by shape. He
discovered that the ratio of round to wrinkled in these
second-generation peas was 3:1. When he re-sorted these peas by color,
keeping very meticulous records of the parent plants, he found the same
ratio of yellow to green, 3:1. Mendel was a patient, thorough worker.
At the end of seven years he had repeated his experiments many times,
ultimately counting over 300,000 peas. By 1863, his experiments were
complete. Mendel’s genius was achieved by hard work and meticulous
record keeping, what Thomas Edison described as "1% inspiration, and
99% perspiration".
From his work, Mendel discovered that traits are transmitted
independently of each other and that each parent hands down one gene
(he did not use this term) for each trait in its offspring. He
discovered that of the genes, one is dominant and one recessive for
each trait. For example, with the peas, the gene for round shape is
dominant, so if one parent contributes a gene for round shape, and the
other gene is for wrinkled shape, these offspring will be round. To
have a wrinkled offspring, a recessive trait, both parents must
contribute the gene for wrinkled shape. This helped describe why both
constancy and variability occur in offspring. While not using the terms
we use today, Mendel was developing the General Laws of Inheritance.
While Mendel was working with his peas, Charles Darwin was finalizing
his Theory of Evolution ; he published his book On the Origin of
Species in 1859. Darwin’s favorite theory of inheritance was
"blending", the predominant theory of the day. He also believed in the
inheritance of acquired traits, a theory put forth by Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck years before. Mendel read Origin of Species in 1860. He studied
it thoroughly and made many notes in the margins. He agreed with some
of Darwin’s points, but disagreed with the basic idea that evolution
showed organisms getting better. He believed evolution (variation) occurred within a closed system, what we might
call microevolution. "The very observation that a particular trait
could be expressed in one of two ways – round pea versus wrinkled, tall
plant versus dwarf – implied limits. Darwin’s evolution was entirely
open-ended; Mendel’s, as any good gardener of the time could see, was
closed." (p. 125, Monk in the Garden , Robin Marantz Henig, Houghton
Mifflin, New York, 2000). As far as is known, Darwin and Mendel never
met, and Darwin never read or even heard of Mendel’s work. Many
evolutionary scientists say that if Darwin had known of Mendel’s work,
he would have been able to theorize a mechanism for evolution. However,
it seems clear from Mendel’s own words that he
realized that Darwin’s major theory was faulty, that species do not
change into new species, but conserve their traits.
In 1863, when he was finished with his experiments, Mendel carefully
recorded and analyzed his findings. He delivered them in a two-part
lecture on February 8 and March 8, 1865, to the Brunn Society for the
Study of Natural science, a group of professional and amateur
scientists. His audience had about 40 people in it, most of whom did
not understand what he was telling them. In his speech to the Brunn
Society on March 8, 1865, he restated the idea of a closed system. "If
adaptive changes do occur in response to environmental influences, he
said, they tend to be conserved, passed on to subsequent generations.
Mendel’s experiments provided a theory that explained
how this conservation occurs. ‘Nothing justifies the assumption that
the tendency to form varieties increases so extraordinarily that the
species speedily loses all stability, and their offspring diverge into
an endless series of extremely variable forms (different kinds),’ he
said. To the contrary, the tendency is toward stability, with variation
being the exception, not the rule." (pp. 141-142, Monk in the Garden ).
In 1866, he published a 44-page article about his findings in the
Proceedings of the Brunn Society, but this article was largely ignored,
in part because the mathematics involved were beyond the understanding
of most scientists. He sent out reprints of his article to several
scientists, but received very little feedback.
Mendel died in 1884, receiving no recognition for his work. His
carefully recorded data was essentially lost until 1900, when his work
was rediscovered by three scientists working independently of each
other. Evolutionary theorists have since appropriated Mendel’s work,
claiming it provides a mechanism for evolution. However, not only is it
clear that Mendel did not believe this, but as more information is
discovered about DNA and inheritance, this concept becomes less and
less plausible. God designed living things with the capacity for great
variety, but within very specific limits. Mendel’s work is
confirmation of this wonderful design. Gregor Mendel
was one of the Creationists Who Created Science.
Editor’s note: Mendel’s work was originally dismissed by evolutionist
because it so clearly showed the limits of genetic variation. It was
only when Darwin’s theory was shown to be completely inadequate in
explaining the great variety in living things, that genetics was
blended into the evolution story. The irony of this is that as more is
learned about DNA, the impossibility of evolution is ever more clearly
demonstrated.
