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The relevance of mendelism in modern genetics
The relevance of mendelism in modern genetics
The work of Gregor Mendel
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These days’ scientists know how we inherit characteristics from our parents; they are able to calculate the probability of inheriting certain traits or genetically passed diseases based on a family medical record. Did you ever ask yourself how did scientists come up to such powerful capabilities? It all started with a monk crossing peas, he realized that there was some kind of pattern to how the peas reproduced. This monk is now known as Gregor Mendel father of genetics. Mendel set a two years trail experiment to see if the peas reproduce with some pattern or he had just observed random change in peas. Mendel then came up with his hypothesis that traits are passed on with a 3:1 ratio after observing this in his trail experiment. Mendel set up an 8 years experiment where he would crossbreed all sorts of peas. After collecting the data from his experiment and mathematically analysing the data he concluded that the inheritance pattern was as he hypothesized a 3:1 ratio. Mendel was rarely quoted for about 34 years. In the late 19th century two botanists/biologists had rediscovered Mendel work, they’ve confirmed a 3:1 ratio. Following the rediscovery, the original paper “EXPERIMENT ON PLANT HYBRIDIZATION” made its way towards the world of genetics. The reason why Mendel was ignored is not known till this day. Some sources suggest that the paper was overlooked since it was a controversy to Darwinism. The main supporter of this theory is R. A. Fisher. In his critique Fisher asks “what was Mendel trying to discover? What did he discover? What did he think he discovered? “Is Mendel’s data accurate? In this essay I will focus on answering Fishers main questions as to how accurate is the data, did Mendel discover anything new, and I will sci...
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...ggests “his conclusions do not follow automatically from the statistics”( A. Pilpel 2007, P.619). Meaning Fisher attacks Mendel’s theory rational but not scientifically.
Are Mendel critiques justified? To my opinion Mendel was over criticized, his guidelines successfully prove his conclusions, the allegations on his paper are well disproven, and last statistical points of view arrant enough to disprove a theory. Besides the fact both rediscover have come to the same conclusions as Mendel “not only obtained the same results through extensive experiments with peas, which lasted for many years, as did De. Vries (the second rediscover) and I but also given the same explanation” (Carl Correns 1950, P.39). t. Fisher could of been right about the point his data might be too close to be true but that’s not a legitimate argument to say a “paper should be read literally” .
In today’s modern age science is moving at a rapid pace; one of those scientific fields that has taken the largest leaps is that of genetics. When genetics first comes to mind, many of us think of it as a type of science fiction, or a mystical dream. Yet genetics is here, it is real, and has numerous ethical implications.
In the 19th century Gregor Mendel accomplished pioneered the first laws of genetics after crossing peas. He conducted an experiment with pea plants. He would use a paintbrush to transfer the genetic coding from one pea plant to another, so he could know exactly who the parents were. With the end of this experiment Mendel came up with two laws; Mendel 's law of segregation, and Mendel 's law of independent assortment. Mendel crossed over purple pea flowers with white pea flowers, which gave him purple pea flowers for the first generation also called F1. Since the offspring were all purple flowers Mendel understood that the purple gene was the dominant gene. Mendel decided to cross the F1 generation with themselves. Which resulted in three purple pea flowers and one white pea flower. By using basic Punnett square, and identify the genotype as PP and the phenotype as pp. This gave Mendel the following ratio of 3:1, three purple pea flowers and one
The major topic of this experiment was to examine two different crosses between Drosophila fruit flies and to determine how many flies of each phenotype were produced. Phenotype refers to an individual’s appearance, where as genotype refers to an individual’s genes. The basic law of genetics that was examined in this lab was formulated by a man often times called the “father of genetics,” Gregor Mendel. He determined that individuals have two alternate forms of a gene, referred to as two alleles. An individual can me homozygous dominant (two dominant alleles, AA), homozygous recessive, (two recessive alleles, aa), or heterozygous (one dominant and one recessive allele, Aa). There were tow particular crosses that took place in this experiment. The first cross-performed was Ebony Bodies versus Vestigle Wings, where Long wings are dominant over short wings and normal bodies are dominant over black bodies. The other cross that was performed was White versus Wild where red eyes in fruit flies are dominant over white eyes.
Gregor Mendel was born into a German family, as a young man Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. In his later life Mendel gained his fame as the founder of the modern science of genetics. The research that was his claim to fame was his pea plant experiment. Mendel looked at seven different characteristics of the pea plants. For example with seed colors when he bred a yellow pea and green pea together their offspring plant was always yellow. Though, in the next generation of plants, the green peas reemerged at a 1:3 ratio. To explain what he had discovered, Mendel put together the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to specific traits. Such as, in the previous example the green peas were recessive and the yellow peas
[7] Klug, W., Cummings, M., Spencer, C., Palladino M. (2012) Concepts of Genetics: Tenth Edition. Pearson's Education, Inc.
The discourse focused on one question: Is creation a viable modern of origins? This directly links to the focus of this essay: that expert disagree despite the same evidence. Part of this comes from confirmation bias, a disregard for facts or ideas that go against one’s own ideation. Ken Ham was guilty of this; he took scientific ideas that only matched his creationist views and distorted them to be portrayed the only correct science. The methods he used, such as coral reef aging, are outdated and have been replaced by better methods, such as radioactive dating. Bill Nye used these more accurate measurements support his argument that the Earth is closer to 4.5 billion years old. Another argument from the creationist side is a distinction between observational and historical science. Essentially, historical science is scientific study in regards to the past, whereas observational science is the scientific research of the present and cannot be applied to the past. Beyond the implication of nigh complete uncertainty of past events and how they transpired, the claim is not even falsifiable. It is impossible to prove that science today is different than past science, thus the idea can be disregarded as any sort of theory. The more rational thought, that science is science whether in the past or present,
In the 19th century, Mendel’s relatively new science of inheritance and hereditary has increasingly developed into what we commonly understand today as genetics. Peter J. Bowler describes this field as becoming “a very active area of scientific research”.
Some arguments presented in the article were quite logical, but other, e.g. A.M.C., sounded rather lame. Handpicking organisms with certain traits is not the best approach to a logical statement, or even a scientific study, for that matter. Humans use generalizations. This helped us survive iver millenia. So, when we want to compare, say, two species, we use specimens- organisms that possess traits which are considered normal for its species. For us, a specimen would be an adult, sane human. In that case, the result would be quite different.
In this experiment fruit flies have been used as models for showing the Mendelian inheritance. Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is a better organism to study genetics because it has many physical traits, short life cycle, and produce many offspring. In this experiment, two crosses were done, each of the obtained two generation F1 and F1. The first cross was between wild-type males (red eyes, normal wings) and mutant Females (white eyes, apterous wings).The second cross was between mutant males (white eyes, apterous wings) and wild type females (red eyes, normal wings) .The inheritance of traits which observed in the crosses, were tested. We have test our hypothesis by using Chi-square analysis for F2’ generation of crosses. Our result about inheritance of traits in the crosses is that mutant traits are X-linked recessive inheritance.
Introduction: Genetics is the study of how genes and heredity combine to create traits in living organisms. Gregor Mendel disproved the theory that heredity comes only from parents. He discovered that there were dominant and recessive genes and his “Law of Dominance” has been used to selectively breed plants and animals for particular attributes. It has also been successfully adopted to identify the risk of passing down genetic diseases. Francis Galton took Mendel’s discoveries further by studying multifactoral inheritance and discovering ‘blending traits’, also known as continuous variation. With these traits, involvement of a wide range of genetic and environmental factors results in the creation of wide-ranging genotypes.
Genes are expected to give offspring hereditary similarities to the parent. However, this was not known and Gregory Mendel asked himself what was passed on by parents to their offspring that is the basis for similarity. Mendel would go on through experiments with pea plants to answer short questions. The answers were short as well as to say that the passing of characteristics from parents to the offspring is throug...
The majority of scientific work in genetics and genomic sequencing has been done in the last 155 years. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species where he proposed evolution by natural selection. Evolution is the change of inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.Yet, the principals of genetics required to explain how characters are ...
In the 1860's, it was known that progeny tended to resemble it parents; but how or why this occurred was a mystery. An Augustinian Monk by the name of Gregor Mendel was studying the passage of traits in pea plants. His pure bred lines and careful observation were the footing upon which modern genetic theory was based. Little did he know that his garden of peas would eventually open the door to billions of dollars of research and years of legal and ethical debates (Griffiths et. al., 1996).
Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who revolutionized our understanding and perception of genetics. Mendel’s experiments in his monastery garden provided future geneticists with the basic principles of hereditary through the experimentation in both hybrid and pure bred pea plants, which he found to follow specific patterns in their offspring. The choice to use peas was because of their distinct varieties and their ability to produce offspring quickly and the ability to easily regulate fertilization simply with the use of a paintbrush. When conducting these experiments Before Mendel Pea Plant Experimentation it was commonly accepted that a child’s genetic traits were simply half from the mother and half from the father. This evidence was supported by experiments were generally conducted over a short period of time resulting in skewed and unreliable data, whereas Mendel’s experiments were conducted over an eight year period involving tens of thousands of plants. Two of Mendel’s traits that he focused on were the texture of the seed pod. E.g. smooth and round or wrinkled. In the first generation of these plants 100% of the pea plants possessed the Smooth and round texture. On the second generation of the pea plants of every 4 pea plants 3 posessed the smooth trait and a singular pea plant produced wrinkled seeds. Upon the review of his results Mendel concluded that characteristics could be expressed through dominant and recessive traits. The Dominant trait masks or completely covers the recessive, whereas a recessive gene is an allele that is only present in a homozygous genotype. Through Mendel’s experiments he proposed three principles of inheritance, whether you are looking at humans or pea plants, the apparent genetic traits t...
Voltaire said “the perfect is the enemy of the good” (Voltaire 74). In striving for a perfect definition and application of scientific analysis, Karl Popper established an impractical and ineffective approach to science. In this paper, I will discuss the premises and principles behind Popper’s scientific method of critical rationalism. I will then explain where I believe his method succeeds, where it fails, and why I consider his method both impractical and ineffective. I will do so by first explaining his thoughts on science versus the status quo, then I will take the position that his approach is flawed and impractical, and lastly conclude with a commentary on why truth has to be flexible. My thesis is that in defining highly rigid parameters