期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：30
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2122144119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Evolution by natural selection is an explicitly genetic theory. Darwin recognized that a working theory of inheritance was central to his theory and spent much of his scientific life seeking one. The seeds of his attempt to fill this gap, his “provisional hypothesis” of pangenesis, appear in his notebooks when he was first formulating his evolutionary ideas. Darwin, in short, desperately needed Mendel. In this paper, we set Mendel’s work in the context of experimental biology and animal/plant breeding of the period and review both the well-known story of possible contact between Mendel and Darwin and the actual contact between their ideas after their deaths. Mendel’s contributions to evolutionary biology were fortuitous. Regardless, it is Mendel’s work that completed Darwin’s theory. The modern theory based on the marriage between Mendel’s and Darwin’s ideas as forged most comprehensively by R. A. Fisher is both Darwin’s achievement and Mendel’s.
