The second-to-last paragraph describes the society’s suspicion of Mendel’s hypothesis because “there was no evidence for Mendel’s hypothesis other than his computations; and his wildly unconventional application of algebra to botany made it difficult for his listeners to understand that those computations were the evidence.” Apparently, Mendel’s contemporaries were unable to accept Mendel’s theories because the only evidence for them was his mathematics. This skepticism towards mathematics shows that they assumed that valid biological theories cannot be based on mathematical proof alone, which is B.