Mendel's peas (was Re: Incest taboos)

Gil Hardwick (gil@landmark.iinet.net.au)
Tue, 16 May 1995 02:19:05 GMT


In article <3p5g86$bj2@clarknet.clark.net>, David of Bedlam) thedavid@clark.net ( () writes:
>
>Okay, listen up: inbreeding magnifies certain genetic traits &
>makes their manifestation more likely. Think of *good* qualities
>as well as drooling.

Thanks for the biology Master Class, Bedlam old boy. Please do excuse
our poor stupid ignorance of such remote esoterica.

Perhaps during the next session you might care to explain to us how
most of the human societies with laws against rooting your own sister
had come to know anything about genetics.

Gregor Mendel, who introduced the idea, wasn't even born until 1822,
while such laws are known to have been in place basically unaltered
since well into the Antipodean pre-contact period.

Mendel, further, was a botanist who lived his life as an Augustinian
monk at the monastery of St Thomas at Brunn, in Austria. In arriving
at his own principles he had studied PEAS (Pisum sativum), in fact, in
his monastery garden.

Those peas must have either been the most promiscuous, immoral little
plants that he had to keep closely related males and females totally
separate lest family in-fighting broke out among them, else none of it
has anything to do with human behaviour whatsoever.

>OTOH my own sister is a fat ugly bitch. I can find better in a
>rescue mission.

Oh David, you don't have to LOOK at her do you?