5,474 Seeds in the Palm

The wrinkled seed betrays itself before the plant flowers. Under the lens, held in the palm at the sorting bench in the Brno garden, the starch is loose and the sugar high, and the seed shrivels in drying where the smooth seed rounds. This spring I have counted 5,474 F2 seeds from the round × wrinkled crosses; 4,021 smooth, 1,453 wrinkled; 2.96 to 1. The ratio holds. It held in the previous generation of 1,963 seeds, and the one before. The discrete character is plain - there is no blending, no intermediate form drifting between smooth and wrinkled - only the two states, and the hidden factor that waits in the smooth ones.

Here is the question that keeps me at the bench after the counting is done. The ratio is stable at this n. Is the accounting stable? I have inferred the mechanism - paired factors, one dominant, one recessive, separating clean at gamete formation - from ratios alone. The ratios are what I measured. The mechanism is what I believe. If I publish now, I publish the ratio as fact and the mechanism as inference, and the two will travel together in the reader’s mind as though they had equal weight. They do not.

And I will confess what the finding changes for me. The monastery’s kitchen garden has been planted for three years now with my experimental stock, and the brothers ask why the seed is sorted by hand when it could simply be sown. If the factor theory is right, I can breed true the smooth-seeded line in two generations and give them a crop that does not split in the cooking pot. Every wrinkled seed I cull this spring is a small personal wager on my own inference. I benefit from believing it quickly.

Still, the temptation to publish early has a shape I recognize: it is the smooth F1, all uniform, all convincing, hiding the recessive doubt that would only appear in the second generation of scrutiny. Nageli has already written back dismissive of my numbers. The fascicle of forty reprints I sent out last year produced no replies. Correctness without routing is silence.

The correction I make tonight is this: I began by thinking the risk of early publication lay in the ratio being wrong. I now believe the ratio is safe - it is the mechanism that must wait, and I will mark it as inference, plainly, in the text, and let the counting continue through another season before I call it fact.