Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) founded the science of heredity with a series of famous experiments cross-breeding pea plants. And yet... when modern statistical techniques are applied to Mendel's original data, the agreement with theory is much too good. After his death, one biologist described him as either a miracle-worker or a liar.

In this episode we'll talk about the lasting controversy surrounding Mendel's work. Did he fake his numbers? Was an unknown assistant cooking the books? Or was it all more innocent than that?

We'll also talk about a 2011 psychology paper that claimed college students could "sense" future events. The international psychology community responded in force, but it took 10 years and millions of dollars to reclaim the credibility of their field.

Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at [email protected]

You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

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Papers discussed in this week's episode:

Beyond the “Mendel-Fisher controversy” by Gregory Radick 2015.

https://gregoryradick.com/greg-radick-beyond-mendel-fisher/

A Statistical Model to Explain the Mendel–Fisher Controversy by Pires & Branco 2010

https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2975

Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect by Daryl Bem 2011

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf

Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project by Kekecs Z et al. 2023

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/10/2/191375/91837/