Antirrhinum

image by Mike Rosulek buy merchandise here to benefit NCSE It's a classic question: if Charles Darwin had known about Gregor Mendel's genetic research, would Darwin have realized it was the missing piece he needed to explain how individual variation was inherited and selected? Was it simply bad luck that Darwin never stumbled on the right experiments? Or was Darwin so constrained by his own perspective on inheritance that he couldn't have seen the importance of Mendel's work, even if he had known about it? Jonathan Howard has written an intriguing overview of this question. He argues that…