At the Limits of (Our) Imagination: Did Mendel Really Fail to See the Importance of his Discovery for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00094862%3A_____%2F19%3AN0000101" target="_blank" >RIV/00094862:_____/19:N0000101 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

At the Limits of (Our) Imagination: Did Mendel Really Fail to See the Importance of his Discovery for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?

Original language description

In the history of science as well as in history in general, it is not possible to seriously ask and answer questions like: What would it be like if....? However, that doesn’t seem to hold in one case: What would it have been like if Darwin had read Mendel or if they communicated with each other? It’s really as if there is an exception in the history of science, because the above questions have been repeatedly asked since the beginning of genetics. There must be a reason, because everyone knows that even the best answer will always be mere speculation and therefore worthless in terms of historical research. But the real reason is probably that even such “worthless” speculation, just in the case of Mendel and Darwin, can tell us something important about how we understand and interpret the very foundations of scientific thought, what modern science is all about and what it stands for. Recently, similar speculation has been posited by Rama S. Singh in his article Limits of imagination. His main argument rests on the assumption that Mendel failed to see the importance of his discovery for Darwin’s theory of evolution. We reject such an assumption, because the study of the original historical sources implies something completely different. Mendel was well aware of the importance of his discovery for Darwin’s theory, and the real limits were not in his imagination, but entirely elsewhere.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Folia Mendeliana

ISSN

0085-0748

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

55

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

5

Pages from-to

17-21

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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