Mendel's Laws of Inheritance — Founding of Genetics
Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brno (now Czech Republic), spent eight years (1856–63) crossbreeding pea plants and carefully recording the inheritance of seven traits (seed colour, pod shape, plant height, etc.) across 29,000 plants. His 1866 paper 'Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden' (Experiments on Plant Hybridisation) proposed two laws: the Law of Segregation (each organism carries two 'factors' — now called alleles — for each trait, and offspring inherit one from each parent); the Law of Independent Assortment (different traits are inherited independently of each other). He described dominant and recessive traits and predicted their ratios with mathematical precision. The paper was published in the proceedings of the Brno Natural History Society and sent to 40 institutions, including Darwin. It was ignored for 34 years. In 1900, three botanists (de Vries, Correns, Tschermak) independently rediscovered Mendel's results and recognised his priority. Mendel's laws, combined with Darwin's natural selection, formed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of the 20th century — the unified theory of evolution that underlies all modern biology.
- Year: 1866 CE
- Category: Scientific
