Inheritance from Pythagoras to Darwin and Mendel
As humanity evolves overtime, evolving or changing is not just in the nature of humanity but also in everything in this universe. Based on written history, philosophers had started thinking about what is in the core of everything which brings up everything but itself of that core element does not change. The journey of this question started with Thales (scientifically) more than 2000 years ago. The ideas are appeared, discussed and evolved overtime, humanities' intellectual accumulation has ascended. As of now, we know a lot more than those great people but who knows, someone/something, in another galaxy, a planet like ours, might be laughing to us... Probably, there is a lot to think, lot to learn, lot to discover, lot to design... Feels like this is the main motivation of humanity, always keep trying to do the best, find something new!
In this post, I'm going to write down some about how the inheritance idea evolved starting from Pythagoras (there are some related stuff made by Thales but those are not included in this post) to Darwin and Mendel.
Let's start with a question and try to position ourselves within the problem. How children are looking like their parents, grandparents? How this mechanism works? How there is a such consistency to keep us all like Homo-Sapiens but also make every one of us different than the others?
Pythagoras, 2500 years ago, put some thoughts on this mysterious subject at that time. Long story short, he claimed that the information to make the kids is located in men's semen and a lady's body just provide food for embryo. Semen collects all the information by moving all around men's body once it completes its journey it is ready to deliver that information. So far, the hypothesis seems logical (there is no God, no supernatural things to explain the phenomena) although we know that it is wrong.
And, on top of this idea as Pythagoras known as seeing things as numbers (he though core of everything is numbers) and associated real life stuff with geometrical shapes (such as, family is a triangle, justice is square or it was represented with [4,9,16,25, etc.]), he raised another interesting idea which sounds pretty logical, the idea that as mentioned above, family is a triangle and each side represents, father, mother and child/children.
Platon had obsessed to create a flawless society to achieve that he build his idea based on Pythagoras. The perfect triangle is right-triangle as in the following formula \(c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}\), so to make a flawless society we should match the right couples to get the best kids as a result to create the best possible society. He though that there must be a way to do it. This idea was fired up again in Germany and in Russia in 20th centaury, and the results are known...
Aristotle was the first guy who criticised Platon's idea on inheritance. He observed that some kids were looking like their mother, some of them more or less like their father and even more interestingly kids may look like their grandparents. Just by this simple observation, by this argument the hypothesis of Pythagoras had thrown to the bin.
When we came to 19th centuries 2 great scientist created the foundation of the genetics and explained the inheritance. Mendel showed us how inheritance works by using green-peas and Darwin (Alfred Russel Wallace as well) explained how species changed and diverged overtime... The journey is not over yet!
