This was also true of the eighteenth-century data of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of color among his peas. Mendel was essentially right in his views of inheritance, but he lacked insight of the full genetic structure of the process, in which the occasional plant might inherit two recessive genes and therefore might be the "wrong" color for its parents. A scientist today, facing such an anomaly as Mendel thought he faced, might be delighted at the implication that theory must be wrong and that the anomaly would itself be of great and original interest to fellow scientists.

XREF: Connects to Thomas Kuhn's work on anomalies and paradigm shifts in scientific revolutions.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 1021