ABSTRACT
At the Galton Institute’s 2000 conference, which was the first part of “A Century of Mendelism”, the historian of science, Peter Bowler, examined the conventional views on the rediscovery of Mendelism in the early years of the twentieth century.1 When Peter discussed the historiography of Gregor Mendel’s role on producing a theory of particulate inheritance, through his experimental work on garden peas in the 1860s, he emphasised that
the rediscovery of Mendelism cannot be understood as a simple recognition by three scientists independently that a particulate model of heredity self-evidently offered the basis for the complete reformulation of scientific thinking in this area.2
