Rhoades reminded me of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar and father of genetics, who tried to replicate his beautiful pea-crossing studies in hawkweeds. It never seemed to work; he died frustrated and defeated, believing his life’s work to be irreproducible and therefore meaningless. Of course it was anything but that. What he didn’t know was that hawkweeds have a strange proclivity: they can produce seeds at random without pollination. In other words, they periodically clone themselves instead of reproducing through plant sex, confounding the whole process of studying genetic crossing.
...more
