Imre Festetics Festetics’s observations highlighted important correlations between variability, adaptation, and development. He also noted the consequences of selection and its role in heredity, believing that variability and his postulated laws of genetics were connected, acting together in breeding as well as in the natural processes controlling populations of different animals,including humans. Festetics, however, was ultimately hindered by the complex nature of his study traits, aspects of wool quality that we now know to be polygenic. When Gregor Mendel turned his attention to inheritance in peas he the latest in a line of Moravian researchers and agriculturalists who had been thinking about
Christianity and science its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. St.Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model theologian," argued that reason is in harmony with faith, and that reason can contribute to a deeper understanding of revelation, and so encouraged intellectual development. The Church's priest-scientists, many of whom were Jesuits, have been among the leading lights in astronomy, genetics, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics, becoming some of the "fathers" of these sciences. Examples include important churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study of genetics), Roger Bacon (a Franciscan friar who was one of the