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SUMMARY:Mendel the fraud? A social history of truth in genetics - Greg Rad
 ick (University of Leeds)
DTSTART:20150423T143000Z
DTEND:20150423T160000Z
UID:TALK58786@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Richard Staley
DESCRIPTION:Two things about Gregor Mendel are common knowledge: first\, t
 hat he was the 'monk in the garden' whose experiments with peas in mid-19t
 h-century Moravia became the starting point for genetics\; second\, that\,
  despite that exalted status\, there is something fishy\, maybe even fraud
 ulent\, about the data that Mendel reported. In the year marking the 150th
  anniversary of Mendel's lectures on his experiments\, this talk will expl
 ore the cultural politics of this accusation of fraudulence against Mendel
 . Although the notion that Mendel's numbers were\, in statistical terms\, 
 too good to be true was well understood almost immediately after the famou
 s 'rediscovery' of his work in 1900\, the problem became widely discussed 
 and agonized over only from the 1960s\, for reasons having as much to do w
 ith Cold War geopolitics as with traditional concerns about the objectivit
 y of science. Appreciating the Cold War origins of the problem as we have 
 inherited it can be a helpful step towards shifting the discussion in more
  productive directions\, for scientific as well as history-of-science purp
 oses.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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