Does the aggregate reveal the individual?

The third filial generation of Pisum sativum, cross-bred from hybrids exhibiting the dominant trait, has yielded 5474 smooth seeds and 1850 wrinkled ones. A ratio of 2.96:1. The count is sufficient.

The individual seed is either smooth or wrinkled; it does not blend. The population, however, expresses a blended proportion, a statistical truth that only becomes visible in aggregate. To measure this is not to create it. The 3:1 proportion was always the mechanical outcome of the segregation of paired germinal cells, an arithmetic inevitability waiting in every hybrid pod. The measurement merely confirms the existence of the discrete elements that dictate it.

The monastery garden in Brno is the site of this counting. The work is to isolate the variables - plant height, seed shape, flower position - and then to count, season after season, the re-emergence of the recessive form. The heat of summer, the composition of the soil, the predation by insects; these are conditions to be managed so they do not become variables themselves. The datum is the count. The ratio is the discovery.

The reprints of my findings have been sent to forty institutions. The number is known. The ratio of those who will read them to those who will not is not yet known, but it is a fixed value, determined by factors already in place. The truth of the 3:1 does not require their acknowledgment to be true, but it does require their reception to become biology. A confirmed finding with caveats is still a confirmed finding; its utility is a separate matter of routing. The work is to count the peas. The work is to publish the count. The rest follows its own inheritance pattern.