We all know how Google home page will display an appropriate image for some event or a person or whatever. It became quite interesting and everyone, I guess, remembers that little guitar thingy that you could actually use.
Now, today’s picture shows green peas (as always, shaped to display “Google”) and some letters and, funny, I immediately recalled Gregor Mendel and his work I studied in 8th grade. And it’s interesting to me that it stayed with me for so long because it was quite a fascinating stuff at the age when these things appear in front of you and with the help of a good teacher I had at the time one truly comprehends that mysteries of life can be explained with science.
“As I tell my students, Mendel was uniquely qualified to accomplish what he did. Coming from an agrarian background, he was familiar with animal and plant breeding and would have been familiar with the idea of plants that bred-true and development of hybrids. As a trained statistician, he would have been able to comprehend the underlying behaviors of numbers in the statistical outcomes he observed. As a monk, he had a tremendous amount of time and solitude to wait for his plants to grow, devote to analyzing the outcomes and hypothesize and test. He was born at the right time to embrace the scientific method and had the unique skills to tease apart this puzzle. All this was done before knowledge of what the genetic material even was.”
Even though he probably cooked his data a bit, it was a phenomenal feat.
I just got into an argument with a moron at the grocery store about genetic modified foods … he did not like me telling him that every domesticated plant is genetically modified - we selectively bred them to a form we wanted instead of what mother nature originated. I was trying to show the moron that genetic modification was not always evil … not everything kills butterflies or makes jesus weep:rolleyes:
Despite Mendel’s great contributions, apparently his results were so close to theoretical that they were statistically impossible. But seeing the peas brought my 10th grade biology classes to mind and the wonderful times we had with fruitflies and ether.
My college data analysis professor told us about this–if I recall correctly, I think he said that a chi-square test showed that he fudged his data. Talk about slaughtering a sacred cow…
I suspect you were being something of a pedant, knowing perfectly well that the phrase “genetically modified” in common parlance always refers to cut-and-paste between species, not selective breeding.
I remember hearing somewhere that when asked why he chose peas instead of something else he replied that it was because he could eat them when he was done.
