Gregor Johann Mendel

The almanac

Today is Wednesday, July 20, the 201st day of 2011 with 164 to follow.

The moon is waning. The morning stars are Mercury and Saturn. The evening stars are Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Mars and Venus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Cancer. They include Austrian monk and pioneering botanist Gregor Johann Mendel in 1822; New Zealand explorer Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 conquered Mount Everest, in 1919; Elliot Richardson, U.S. attorney general under U.S. President Richard Nixon, in 1920; actors Sally Ann Howes in 1930 (age 81), Diana Rigg (age 73) and Natalie Wood, both in 1938; singer Kim Carnes in 1945 (age 66); guitarist Carlos Santana in 1947 (age 64), and actors Donna Dixon in 1957 (age 54), Sandra Oh in 1971 (age 40) and Omar Epps in 1973 (age 38).

On this date in history:

In 1859, American baseball fans were charged an admission fee for the first time when 1,500 spectators each paid 50 cents to see Brooklyn play New York.

In 1881, five years after U.S. Army Gen. George A. Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to the army, which promised amnesty for him and his followers.

In 1945, the U.S. flag was raised over Berlin as the first U.S. troops moved in to take part in the post-World War II occupation.

In 1940, Billboard magazine published its first "Music Popularity Chart," topped by "I'll Never Smile Again" by the Tommy Dorsey orchestra with Frank Sinatra.

In 1951, while entering a mosque in the Jordanian sector of east Jerusalem, King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist.

In 1968, the first Special Olympics Games were contested at Soldier Field in Chicago.

In 1969, U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon.

In 1976, the Viking 1 lander, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, became the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars.

In 1985, treasure hunter Mel Fisher located a Spanish galleon sunk by a 1622 hurricane off Key West, Fla. It contained $400 million worth of treasure.

In 1989, U.S. President George H.W. Bush called for the United States to organize a long-range space program to support an orbiting space station, a moon base and a manned mission to Mars.

In 1992, seven people were killed when a test model of the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey transport aircraft crashed into the Potomac River.

Happy Birthday Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 - January 6 ...

Gregor Mendel is the Augustinian Monk and Scientist who developed the model of genetics that held sway all the way through the Darwinian Synthesis (when, essentially, it was introduced and integrated) and right up until recently, when it has weakened considerably compared to other conceptions of genetics based on observations not possible in his time. "Mendelian Genetics" still "works" more or less, it just applies to fewer cases in its original simple form. Mendel's main contribution was probably to demonstrate that inheritance involves both parents in roughly equal ways ant that the unit of inheritance is bot particulate and immutable between generations, so that even if a trait is invisible in an individual, the genetic material was not necessarily absent and could contribute to future generations. That (assuming "immutable" is not perfect) is all still pretty much both true and important.

Experiments in Plant Hybridisation

Gregor Mendel, Genetics Pioneer

Genius Genes, How Asperger Talents Changed the World

Concepts of genetics

Breakthroughs in science