Interesting quote from the Bill Murray Reddit AMA thread about how a visit to the Philippines made him think of Gregor Mendel:

But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking “this is like Mendel’s garden” because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.

Gregor Mendel was the Augustinian friar and gardener whose experiments with peas laid the foundation for modern genetics, in what would become the Czech Republic, back in the 19th Century.

The Philippines, of course, has been colonized by Spain and the United States, and its people have always been a mix of Southeast Asian, Chinese, Spanish, South American, and Pacific Islander genes since prehistoric times. Basically, Bill Murray said we’re a lot like Gregor Mendel’s peas. Some time I will need to write about my Genographic Project DNA test results; they were surprising.