Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về sinh học được đăng trên tạp chí sinh học Journal of Biology đề tài: The light of evolution. | Journal of Biology BioMed Central Editorial The light of evolution Miranda Robertson This month Journal of Biology like almost everyone else has some specially commissioned articles to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin s birth although it may not be immediately obvious where the Darwin articles end and our usual review content begins. This is in part a reflection of the admirable strength of our sister BMC journals from which the subject matter of our minireviews is largely drawn in evolutionary biology and in genomics but it is also in large part of course a tribute to the pervasiveness of what Paul Harvey 1 calls the Darwinian agenda. Paul Harvey s is one of the two specially commissioned articles that is about Darwin himself rather than his legacy. We asked him to write on what Darwin actually proved a question that arises from time to time in the context of the Popperian definition of the scientific process but that Harvey has adroitly sidestepped in favour of a selection of vivid examples of Darwin s singular character as a thinker and an experimental biologist. Of course Darwin didn t get everything right. In some cases given what was not known at the time he couldn t have. An egregious case in which arguably he could have but notably he didn t was the Mendelian segregation of inherited characteristics. Harvey finds this failure surprising Jonathan Howard in the second of our two articles on Darwin 2 explains why Darwin failed despite in the course of extensive and meticulous breeding experiments with plants having what we should recognize as Mendelian segregation patterns under his nose. I am not sure especially after reading Howard s article that it isn t more surprising that Mendel did see them and realized before the discovery of the chromosomal basis of inheritance at the beginning of the 20th century what they must mean. The usual explanation for Mendel s success is his strong background in statistics and probability theory Howard s explanation for .
