When: Monday, May 17th 7-9 PM
What: Mendel, Evolution, and Your Hairy Knuckles
Who: Scott Weitze, Genetics Lecturer, San Francisco State University
Where: Atlas Cafe, 3049 20th St @ Alabama St. in the Mission District
The Deets:
With the rainy days of winter gone and the sunny days of spring on the way, people throughout San Francisco will start tending to personal rooftop and backyard gardens. After many weeks of benign neglect (hey, who wouldn’t rather go to a Giants game than pull weeds on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July?), a few small tomatoes, a couple of cucumbers, and a handful of peas might be ready for harvesting, a minor reward from a bit of summertime distraction.

And yet, using gardening quite similar to that seen throughout our city, a single man with little biology training, a strong religious faith, and severe test anxiety discovered the rules which govern genetic inheritance, knowledge that had eluded Darwin, Lamarck, and other prominent biologists for centuries. Many now think of Gregor Mendel as the monk-creator of tedious high school biology lectures on pea plant color…. pea plant size… pea plant shape… pea plant whatever. But the reasons Mendel worked by himself for eight long, lonely years in a tiny monastery garden to discover the rules of heredity, rules which were ultimately used to support Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, are complex and surprising.

But did Mendel’s experiments provide insight into human genetics? And why does genetics “work”? In our talk, we’ll discuss Mendel’s motivations and writings, illustrate why meiosis (sex!) and Mendel are the same thing, and show you how to follow your own inherited Mendelian traits. (Can you roll your tongue? Do you have hairy knuckles? Did mom have an affair with the mailman?)