The Gene begins by Siddhartha Mukherjee begins with Mendel in the monastery, where he is perceived as slow, a good guy for the garden, not smart enough to be a teacher, but they gave him every chance, and he’s sent to study. Thus, to learn under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Christian Doppler . The brilliant mathematician and physicist - who argued that the pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on location and velocity of the observer. An experimentalist whose work would influence Einstein ’s perceptions in the following century, he very well have noticed a train whistle changing pitch as it approached and receded, to develop his theory by way of analogy . TV histories of this may suggest he hired a band, put them on a train, and demonstrated his theory to a fin-de-siecle crowd. Mendel’s era was the tail end of Linnaean , the era when eager naturalists valiantly classified according to likeness . Naming has lost some of its pana...