Aristotle taught that a human embryo grows from a spiritual essence provided by the father. In the eighteenth century, some thinkers imagined preformed miniatures - the entire human race, one inside the other like Russian dolls, placed by God within the womb of Eve. Even when Gregor Mendel's now-famous experiments with peas revealed the existence of what Mendel called "dominent" and "recessive" traits, other researchers ignored the findings. The history of genetics, argues Peter J. Bowler, is often a history of scientists' religious, political, and social preconceptions. In The Mendelian Revolution Bowler shows how our thinking about heredity and reproduction has changed over centuries. He describes how modern notions of heredity developed, explains what Gregor Mendel's work really meant, and challenges the myth of Mendelism's "rediscovery" in the twentieth century. From the example of genetics, he reveals the flaws in the traditional view of scientific progress as an objective search for empirical truth. And he reveals how understanding Mendelism and heredity can help us understand the increasingly complex role of genetics in the modern world. -- from dust jacket.

Mendelism : discovery or invention? -- Heredity before Darwin -- Evolution and heredity -- The cell in development and heredity -- Mendel's contribution -- The emergence of Mendelism -- Classical genetics -- Heredity and politics -- From classical to molecular genetics.