The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics

by Robin Marantz Henig

This was a comforting view of the universe. Everything was orderly, everything was preordained, and everything existed for the aid and benefit of mankind. This view was seriously challenged in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the physicist Rudolf Clausius discovered entropy. Nature was not comforting and orderly at all, he said; objects tended to move in the direction of extreme disorder. The second law of thermodynamics, which Clausius formulated, also called the law of entropy, stated that every isolated system becomes more disordered over time. In this construction an orderly system is as regulated as a crystal, with each atom in precisely the right spot, while a disordered system is like vegetable soup, arranged at random without any clear pattern or organization. And the flow of nature is toward greater randomness, patternlessness, and disorganization—an unsettling view for people who saw God’s logic in every flutter of a butterfly.