Darwin's Influence on Mendel: Evidence from a New Translation of Mendel's Paper. Issue 2 (1st October 2016)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Darwin's Influence on Mendel: Evidence from a New Translation of Mendel's Paper. Issue 2 (1st October 2016)
- Main Title:
- Darwin's Influence on Mendel: Evidence from a New Translation of Mendel's Paper
- Authors:
- Fairbanks, Daniel J
Abbott, Scott - Abstract:
- Abstract: Gregor Mendel's classic paper, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybrids), was published in 1866, hence 2016 is its sesquicentennial. Mendel completed his experiments in 1863 and shortly thereafter began compiling the results and writing his paper, which he presented in meetings of the Natural Science Society in Brünn in February and March of 1865. Mendel owned a personal copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, a German translation published in 1863, and it contains his marginalia. Its publication date indicates that Mendel's study of Darwin's book could have had no influence while he was conducting his experiments but its publication date coincided with the period of time when he was preparing his paper, making it possible that Darwin's writings influenced Mendel's interpretations and theory. Based on this premise, we prepared a Darwinized English translation of Mendel's paper by comparing German terms Mendel employed with the same terms in the German translation of Origin of Species in his possession, then using Darwin's counterpart English words and phrases as much as possible in our translation. We found a substantially higher use of these terms in the final two (10th and 11th) sections of Mendel's paper, particularly in one key paragraph, where Mendel reflects on evolutionary issues, providing strong evidence of Darwin's influence on Mendel.
- Is Part Of:
- Genetics. Volume 204:Issue 2(2016)
- Journal:
- Genetics
- Issue:
- Volume 204:Issue 2(2016)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 204, Issue 2 (2016)
- Year:
- 2016
- Volume:
- 204
- Issue:
- 2
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2016-0204-0002-0000
- Page Start:
- 401
- Page End:
- 405
- Publication Date:
- 2016-10-01
- Subjects:
- Centennial
Genetics -- Periodicals
576.5 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.oxfordjournals.org/ ↗
- DOI:
- 10.1534/genetics.116.194613 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0016-6731
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 25220.xml