Garden Party - The Monday Morning Memo

***Garden Party,*** by Witold Wojtkiewicz (1907)
**Opening Bid:** 500,000 Polish Zloty, ($129,000)

“Though inclined as a scientist toward the immutability of laws – physics and chemistry had laws: Newton’s first law of motion, say, or Boyle’s law about the behavior of gasses – Darwin was actually giving us reason to consider that biology had no laws. Instead, it had situations, like evolution or parthenogenesis or mitosis. People wonder sometimes if Darwin might have written in a different way about biological evolution if he’d had Mendel’s ‘laws’ of inheritance to work with. The answer to this is that if Mendel had preceded Darwin, we likely would never had gotten the Darwin who created such an impact. Mendel’s observations about genetic inheritance were not about predictability, as Mendel had hoped. They were about probability, and probability was awaiting a mathematics that would make change more comprehensible.”

- Barry Lopez, Horizons, (2019) p. 260-261

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