About Gregor Mendel and criticisms against his work: Judging the fudging of data

Source: The post is based on the article “Judging the fudging of data” published in The Hindu on 8^th August 2022.

Syllabus: GS 3 – Awareness in the field of biotechnology.

Relevance: About the contribution of Gregor Mendel and the issues surrounding fudging of data.

News: Recently the 200th birth anniversary of Gregor Mendel, the ‘father of modern genetics’ was celebrated worldwide. This raised the issue of judging the fudging(cheating) of data.

About Gregor Mendel

-Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity and laid the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics.

-He performed controlled crossing experiments on around 29,000 plants with the garden pea between 1856 and 1863. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent.

-He registered many observable characteristics, such as the shape and colour of the seeds, and the colour of the flower, and formulated two principles of heredity.

His seminal paper, ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization’, was published in the Proceedings of the Brunn Society for Natural Science in 1866.

In 1900, the British biologist William Bateson unearthed Mendel’s paper and gave posthumous recognition to Mendel’s works.

What are the criticisms against Mendel’s work?

In 1936, eminent British statistician and geneticist, Sir Ronald Fisher, published a paper. By reconstructing Mendel’s experiments, Fisher found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes to be implausibly close to the expected ratio of 3:1. He claimed that Mendel’s data agree better with his theory than expected under natural fluctuations.

But he also concluded, “The data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified to agree closely with Mendel’s expectations.” Numerous articles have been published on the Mendel-Fisher controversy subsequently.

How has the Mendel theory and fudging of data evolved recently?

In a 1984 book, an author argued that Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Galileo, Newton, Bernoulli, Dalton, Darwin, and Mendel are all alleged to have violated standards of good research practice.

The 2008 book by Allan Franklin and others ended the Mendel-Fisher Controversy. The book recognised that “the issue of the ‘too good to be true’ aspect of Mendel’s data found by Fisher still stands.

How one can judge the cheating of data?

Benford’s law says that in many real-life numerical data sets, the proportion of times of different leading digits is fixed.

It is difficult to conclude fudging in most cases. The available technologies for identifying data fudging are still inadequate to address all possible situations.

Judging the fudging is a continual process, empowered with new technologies, scientific interpretations, and ethical standards.