Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brunn, cross-bred garden pea plants and tracked seven distinct traits across generations. He found that hybrid offspring showed one dominant trait, that the recessive trait reappeared in about one quarter of the next generation, and that these ratios could be explained by discrete hereditary units passed from each parent, becoming the basis of Mendel's laws of inheritance.
Facts
YearMendel bred and tracked the pea plants from about 1856 to 1863; he presented the results, Experiments in Plant Hybridization, at the Natural History Society of Brunn on February 8 and March 8, 1865, which is the year used here. MethodMendel bred pea plants to true-breeding lines for single traits, cross-pollinated chosen lines by hand, and tracked how traits such as seed colour, pod colour and plant height reappeared across generations of offspring. 1 Key FindingTraits were inherited as discrete units in roughly three-to-one ratios rather than blending, with some forms dominant over recessive alternatives, establishing the particulate basis of inheritance later formalized as Mendelian genetics. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Conducted By
Precursor To
Mendel's 1856 to 1863 pea plant breeding, published 1866 and largely ignored until rediscovered around 1900, established that inheritance is particulate and follows statistical ratios rather than blending; this genetic mechanism, missing from Darwin's own account, is what the Modern Synthesis combined with natural selection.
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