The Reification of Mendel

Abstract

A re-examination of the case of Mendel suggests that he was neither ignored in the 1860s nor simply re-discovered in 1900. In 1900, the concern for priority among De Vries, Correns and Tschermak, and the controversy between Bateson and the biometricians over species variation, led scientists to reconstruct the relevance of Mendel's hybridization experiments with Pisum in terms of their own work on natural selection. By contrast, an examination of the original paper indicates Mendel's concern, not with variability, but with the very process of speciation via hybridization.