Gregor Mendelthe LabyrinthINTP

In 1874 the Austrian parliament put a new tax on the monasteries. Gregor Mendel, 51, abbot of St Thomas's in Brünn, decided it was unconstitutional and refused to pay.

The law was valid. He refused anyway, for the rest of his life.

He had been born in 1822 to a poor farming family in Austrian Silesia, and became an Augustinian friar, a teacher and a scientist. In the monastery garden he crossed varieties of peas, counted their offspring, and found in the numbers a regularity nobody had seen: the rules by which traits pass from parent to child. In 1865 he presented the work to the naturalists' society in Brünn.

Then he held back. One experiment, however clean, did not seem enough to him. On 18 April 1867, at 44, he explained his caution to the Munich botanist Carl Nägeli.

So he set out to repeat his results in other plants, and tried, in his words, “to inspire some control experiments” from others. It is the Labyrinth virtue at its purest: never trust a single result, and ask someone else to check. It went wrong for a reason nobody then knew. Hawkweed, one of the plants he chose, mostly makes seeds without mixing its parents at all. Year after year it gave him numbers that would not agree.

In 1868 he was made abbot. Six years later came the tax. To Mendel it was unjust to tax one kind of institution while another went free. He protested, he appealed, he wrote. Several monasteries had objected at first. One by one they gave in, until he stood alone.

The last one standing can be a hero. He can also be the only person who hasn't noticed what everyone else has. Labyrinths are rarely fooled by other people's arguments. A case they have built themselves, carefully and alone, is much harder to see round. His reasoning held at every step. Only the premise at the bottom was wrong.

The authorities lost patience and took part of the monastery's property under state control to collect the tax themselves. He went on protesting until he was too ill to continue. His experiments had already stopped.

He died on 6 January 1884, at 61. Soon afterward his successor had his papers burned, reportedly to put an end to the tax quarrel.

It was the same habit, twice. In 1867 he would not trust one experiment, and that is why his counts still stand. In 1874 he would not accept a law he thought unjust, and that refusal took his last decade.

There was one difference. In 1867 the scientist asked other people to check him. In 1874 the abbot, as far as anyone knows, asked no one.