Thus, schools could provide a prior basis for heredity, so that students could begin to study evolution with a proper background in genetics. It is often said that Darwin 'lacked' a theory of heredity and, therefore, he had not been able to produce the synthetic theory of evolution himself. It is common to present Mendelian genetics to high school students prior to Biological Evolution, having in mind historical and epistemological assumptions regarding connections between the works of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. Many studies have shown that students' understanding of evolution is low and some sort of historical approach would be necessary in order to allow students to understand the theory of evolution. History of science can contribute to put the mythic Mendel into question in the science classroom, bringing school science closer to the controversies around the interpretation of his work.
The point is, rather, that it is important to avoid treating Mendel’s contributions as uncontroversial, mentioning, for instance, that there are ongoing debates on whether he proposed the laws named after him, appealing to invisible factors underlying phenotypic traits that are seen as the heritable potentials for those traits, and would in due time be known as genes.
Evidently the idea is not that school teachers could solve problems still under discussion in the historical literature. Here, we discuss the contributions that history of science and papers published in journals that target teachers may bring to improve how school science deals with Mendel and his contributions.
These problems are often found in textbooks and are likely to be present in school science throughout the world. Another problem is the neglect of other scientists working on inheritance in the second half of the 19th century, including Darwin, Spencer, Galton, Nägeli, Brooks, Weismann and de Vries, who paved the way for the reinterpretation of Mendel’s work in 1900. School science descriptions about Mendel and his story are problematic because several statements that are controversial among historians of science are repeated over and over again as if they were established facts.
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