Thread:Shugaboy/@comment-24577221-20170805190245/@comment-24577221-20170823040936

Nowhere near that many plants, but quite a lot.

The quick version is: Yes, he kept immaculate records, and his contribution to the field of genetics was... a lot less than it might seem. Because he reported his results only in one obscure journal that almost nobody read. So a few decades later, three other people independently did very similar work, and it was only when they were searching the literature carefully before publishing that they found Mendel's prior work. They gave him credit for it, but really, there was a lot of wasted effort because he didn't report his work effectively, and the field could have been that many years ahead if he had.

Also, statistical analysis of his data makes it clear that he was fudging it to make it match his conclusions. His numbers are too close to the expected fractions; there should be more variation. We don't know to what extent the fudging was intentional -- if he was outright faking things, or if he was saying "well, that pea plant doesn't look healthy, I'll leave it out" kinds of things in such a way as to make his numbers better.