MONUMENT TO MENDEL

Monument to the discoveries.

A week ago I was standing with my wife by the River Tagus in Lisbon, next to the Monument to the Discoveries. The monument is at the spot where Vasco da Gama set out to discover the southeast passage from Europe to Asia, past the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco’s discovery marked the beginning of the Portuguese maritime empire. At the furthest tip of Europe, Portugal was perfectly situated to found su...

Mendel might get dizzy.

Building on Mendel

Twelve months after the first successes of an ambitious project to commemorate Mendel in the abbey where he carried out his work, efforts are now turning to the gardens, perhaps some of the most intellectually fruitful patches of ground in the world. Restoration work in the abbey, in the beautiful Czech city of Brno, reveals a building in which little has changed since Mendel’s time where it is...

Did Mendel cheat?

Darwin, Mendel, and Galton.

THIS paper was never meant to be a centenary address, in fact until I started to prepare it I did not realize that the original Darwin-Wallace communication to the Linnean Society was read in I858. An interest in human genetics led me to seek more knowledge of the lives of the three men who seemed to me to have been the founders of our present understanding of heredity. Darwin's evidence in fav...