Darwinism, DNA research and Mendel’s laws, do they form a whole or are they different?

Answer

The three absolutely form a whole, they do not contradict each other but complement each other in an exemplary way.

The central mechanism of evolution relies on two phenomena: the occurrence of variants in a population, and natural selection that makes the best-adapted variants more successful in reproduction, so that those variants will gradually become more frequent over the generations .

Darwin understood and described that mechanism, based on what he had seen in nature: that certain populations, of the famous finches in the Galapagos Islands, for example, were precisely adapted to the conditions in which they lived.

Mendel’s experiments with sweet peas date from about the same period as Darwin published his books. Mendel’s laws describe one of the mechanisms by which variations occur in a population: offspring of sweet peas with red and white flowers are pink, which differs from both parents, i.e. a variant. And if you cross plants with pink flowers, you will find pink, white and red flowers among the offspring. Plants that differ from each other in more than one characteristic give rise after a few generations to a large number of variants with different combinations of characteristics.

The entire science of DNA can perfectly explain Mendel’s findings. What Mendel called “hereditary factors” we now call genes: pieces of hereditary code that we can now also read. DNA technology makes it possible to “measure” the relationship between species by counting the differences in the DNA code, and indeed the resulting family tree is sometimes a little different from what was previously predicted based on visible data. properties. However, that is no reason to doubt the mechanisms Darwin described. It is indeed a refinement, and sometimes illustrates the power of natural selection. For example, desert plants from South America and Africa may look quite similar (Darwin would have thought they were closely related), but at the DNA level they turn out to be quite different. They have evolved in the same circumstances, and they have found similar solutions through a gradual process of natural selection of the best adapted variants, through a different route.