I remember being very impressed many years ago by a television documentary about a monk of Buckfast- a Brother Adam, I think- who was attempting to breed, so it was said, the perfect British bee. In other words a bee best suited to the British climate and environment. This was about thirty years ago and it was a programme I had come upon by chance so I remember little enough but I was powerfully struck by the realisation that there was something very special - very appropriate - about the monastic setting in which he was able to carry on this work. He had been at this project for decades and there was a parallel with Mendel formulating the laws of genetic inheritance also within a monastic setting. Mendel's steady patient work, experiments with humble pea plants carried out in the monastery garden, was of profound and lasting significance.
I have to admit to being puzzled by the attention given to Darwin. Were his discoveries really all that momentous? Perhaps I am a blockhead but the theory of natural selection sounds like something out of a pruning manual. Things do well under the conditions that suit them. They don't do so well under conditions that don't suit them. Genius?
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