TSAWTB Section 6 - Interlude - A Miscellany of Items

252 Section 6 - Interlude
SECTION 6.2
MENDEL’S RESULTS “TOO GOOD TO BE
TRUE”
Whilst in a humorous mood, the following might be of interest also.
It is a little known fact that the results Gregor Mendel achieved in his
experiments with breeding varieties of peas to prove his law of genetic
inheritance were actually far too accurate to be true (Annals of Science v1
p115). They should have been much more wide of the ideal 1:4 ratio than that
which he reported in his paper. By way of light relief, the following article
entitled “Peas on Earth” appeared in a professional journal and was repeated
in Betrayers of the Truth (Broad:33)
In the beginning there was Mendel, thinking his lonely thoughts
alone. And he said: “Let there be peas”, and there was peas and it
was good. And he put the peas in the garden and saying unto them
“Increase and multiply, segregate and assort yourselves independently”,
and they did and it was good. And now it came to pass that
when Mendel gathered up his peas, he divided them into round and
wrinkled, and called the round dominant and the wrinkled recessive,
and it was good. But now Mendel saw that there were 450
round peas and 102 wrinkled ones; and this was not good. For the
law stateth that there should be only 3 round for every wrinkled.
And Mendel said unto himself “Gott in Himmel. An enemy has
done this. He has sown bad peas in my garden under the cover of
night.” And Mendel smote the table in righteous wrath saying
“Depart from me, you cursed and evil peas, into the outer darkness
where thou shalt be devoured by the rats and mice.” And lo it was
done and there remained 300 round peas and 100 wrinkled peas,
and it was good. It was very, very good. And Mendel published.
SECTION 6.3
“ALICE IN WONDERLAND” AND EVOLUTION
Lewis Carroll’s books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass have delighted children and adults for many generations all over the
world. Characters and sayings in his strange world of topsy-turvey logic have
been used to express many facets of life - Tweedledum and Tweedledee; the
Mad Hatter; “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but no jam today,” - to
mention just a few.
However, few realise that almost every character in his books was a (not so
gentle) lampoon of many of the famous people he knew. This has been
researched by Jones and Gladstone in their interesting book The Red King’s
Dream (JoneJ95).
Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a
mathematics don at Oxford who loved word-plays, puzzles and puns etc. His
derived his pen-name from Charles = Carollus and Lutwidge became Lewis.
Because of a stammer he would announce his name as Do-Do-Do-Dodgson,
and so became “Dodo” to his friends - and one of the many characters he used
in Alice.
The Red King’s Dream is somewhat rambling in style but we would
recommend it to the reader interested in tracking down who and what in the