Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

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From the Scientific American article, emphasis mine:

> Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

I am ignorant about the work of Karl Pearson, but I can see how certain attitudes or expressions of Galton and Darwin could be understood as morally "racist" in our modern understanding and values—not that I believe that detracts from their legacy in any way whatsoever. However, I find the mention of Gregor Mendel truly disconcerting.

As far as I am aware, Mendel's work was absolutely restricted to his research on peas and a strictly mathematical interpretation of the results, and at no point did he extrapolate to anything regarding human inheritance in any way. What's more, I would be extremely surprised if the thought of so-called human "races" was even relevant to the thoughts of a Central European friar of the 19th century who never left the area. In a translated copy of Mendel's Versuche über Plflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization) [0] I find not a single use of the word "human", "mankind" or "race", and the only use of the word "man" refers to the act of cultivation. Where on Earth is the "racist idea"?

If the author of this SA article happened to be a historian of science, or even a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist, I might still be surprised but give her the benefit of the doubt and think she might know something I don't. However, to have "an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health" make such an astounding clichéd name drop is clear evidence that she is speaking out of ignorance and prejudiced "guilt-by-association" of the whole area of the Modern Synthesis of evolution and genetics.

[0] - http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65.pdf

I think the big problem with Mendel is that the odds of him obtaining the results he reported are vanishingly low and, therefore, it’s reasonable to assume he forged the results.

Luckily, his model was correct.

> I think the big problem with Mendel is that the odds of him obtaining the results he reported are vanishingly low

Why do you think so?

Why do you think his odds at obtaining those results were vanishingly low?

It is a quite old and often repeated claim, first made by Ronald Fisher in 1936.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Mendelian_parado...

Thank you for your reference to that link. Having now seen it I do recall that controversy albeit not in that level of detail (such work isn't my profession).

I know from practical experience that most of the points Fischer et al have made are often valid or the case including those about producing 'tailored' results for a specific target audience. Often one comes across most of them in one's own work and it's usually when one is tying to figure out whether one's actually deluding oneself given, say, that a set of results looks too good. Alternatively, one may have a dataset that's full of garbage and not yet realized it.

Then there are always those cases where most of the data fits within the expected distribution except for some wayward measurement or two, which if included, would throw the stats and make the overall experiential results look less precise. What does one do, ditch out the odd/atypical results or rerun the whole experiment again in the hope that those large wayward deviations don't reappear? Anyone who has done experiments is overly familiar with the problems of processing experiential data—as they say, they're just part of the territory.

Clearly, I've no hands-on expertise in Mendel's work so I can only make general comment which is that as Mendel is no longer around to defend himself or his work, as such we must be particularly careful about accusing him of doing something of which he may not have done. From that Wiki, despite the controversy, it seems that the passage of time has meant that Mendel's work seems to have been examined with reasonable rigor and care given that it's been re-examined and reanalyzed on multiple occasions by different personnel. In the absence of better and more accurate data there's little more we could reasonably do.

I suppose I'm overly sensitive to accusations of fraud because of an incident that happened eons ago back in my student days. This was when a chemistry tutor blatantly accused me of cheating in my write-up of an experiment and he did so in the presence of other students. What he objected to was that my experimental results (dataset) of a titration were too good to be true and that I'd worked back and substituted data from the theoretical/ideal model.

This wasn't the case at all as I had recorded the titration's dataset exactly as I'd measured it. Needless to say, I was furious at his unfounded accusation and I demanded that he say back over lunchtime and watch me whilst I reran the experiment, this he did. The results I obtained on the rerun were just marginally better than my first attempt.

I lay no claim to being an experiential genius—absolutely far from it. I'll just say this: some people are intrinsically much better at experimental work than are others and those who doubt their results are perhaps basing their doubt on their own less-than-optimal performance. That said, one's always right to doubt any claim or sets of results until they're independently verified.

If so, how would that forgery substantiate a claim that he was racist?

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