From Gregory Radick at Nature:
The problem is that the Mendelian ‘genes for’ approach is increasingly seen as out of step with twenty-first-century biology. If we are to realize the potential of the genomic age, critics say, we must find new concepts and language better matched to variablebiological reality. This is important in education, where the reliance on simple examples may even promote an outmoded determinism about the power of genes.
…
What of Mendel? Some might complain that it is a poor anniversary gift to jettison him from his place of honour in the genetics curriculum. Let me suggest that this grumbling, although understandable, is misguided. If we want to honour Mendel, then let us read him seriously, which is to say historically, without back-projecting the doctrinaire Mendelism that came later. Study Mendel, but let him be part of his time.
Likewise, let our biology students be part of their time, by giving them a genetics curriculum fit for the twenty-first century. If we teach them about Mendel, we should do so not to fill them with slack-jawed wonder at his foundational achievement, but to help them to appreciate how even the most imaginative and rigorous science — and Mendel’s was first rate on both counts — bears the stamp of the historical circumstances of its making. To learn that lesson about past science is to bring a welcome level of self-awareness and critical self-reflection to the present. More.
This has got to be bad news for Darwinism today (not that one hears it directly admitted). Darwinian evolution depends so heavily on the mechanistic and determinist view of inheritance based in Mendelian genetics.
A post-Mendelian view might be better suited to the current drive toward rethinking evolution.
See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there?
and What the fossils told us in their own words