252 Raphael Falk
one. Furthermore, contrary to reductive explanations in, say, physiology, which
were chemical and physical in nature, that offered by Mendel was purely phe-
nomenological (“Developmental mechanics”, although declared by Wilhelm Roux,
its founder, to be the causal study ofform, strived to reduce all phenomena to
“the more recent concepts of physics and chemistry” [Roux, 1894/1986]).
Mendel’sVersuche ̈uber Pflanzen-Hybriden(Experiments on plant hybrids) read
at the February and March 1865 meetings of Br ̈unn’sNaturforschenden Vereinpre-
sented a well formulated theory of heredity that he had probably conceived already
before he carried out his hybridization experiments [Orel, 1996, 93–95]. The very
small size of the patch of land at his disposal in the garden of his monastery (35m
×7m; plus some more space in Abbot Napp’s greenhouse measuring 22.7m×
4.5m; see Orel, [1996, 96]) dictated him a meticulous planning of his experiments
in which he obtained within seven years (1856–1863) results from many thousands
of plants. There was absolutely no room for wasteful trial-and-error experiments.
In 1936 R. A. Fisher pointed out the improbability of getting numerical results that
fit expectations to the extent that Mendel presented in the published version of
his talks (Fisher [1936]; see also Stern and Sherwood [1966]): His results were too
good to be true. Hypotheses of foul play by Mendel or one of his helpers abounded
(see, e.g., Sapp [1990, Chapter 5]). However, as already noted by L. C. Dunn, “the
excessive goodness of fit to a theory that runs through his data certainly indicates
that he had a theory in mind when the data as reported were tallied” [Dunn, 1965].
Recently Edward and Charles Novitski’s analysis of Mendel’s experimental results
indicates that Mendel may have planned his experiments even more carefully than
was believed so far: Anticipating the failure of some seeds to germinate or grow,
Mendel, it appars, replaced failed plants by applying a of policy that inadvertently
introduced a bias approximately compensating for the deviation that Fisher would
have expected [C. E. Novitski, 2004; E. Novitski, 2004].
Claims that Mendel’s objective was merely practical, namely to find the em-
pirical laws that describe the formation of hybrids and the development of their
offspring over several generations rather than uncovering universal laws of nature
[Monaghan and Corcos, 1990] must also be rejected [Falk and Sarkar, 1991]. To
the extent that one can reconstruct Mendel’s intentions, I suggested that he was
looking for the plan of the Creator for eternal transcendental realities. Like Ke-
pler, two hundred and fifty years before him, he believed that this plan of reality
is formulated in simple mathematical relationships [Falk, 2001a]. Unfortunately,
because of unsuccessful experiments withHieracium(the hawkweed) on the insti-
gation of the botanist N ̈ageli, and his growing duties as abbot of the monastery,
Mendel did not pursue his hybridization work [Orel, 1996].
Whereas the success of reductionism in physiological studies, induced embryolo-
gists to direct their efforts toward developmental mechanics (Entwicklungmechanik)
[Lenoir, 1982], students of evolution could not agree on a simple reductionist mech-
anism that would replace Darwin’s notion of continuous variation of the organism
as a whole (note that Darwin’s speculation of inheritance by particulate pangenes
was apre-cellular hypothesis. Pangenes migrated freely through the organism’s