Gregor Mendel And Inheritance
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Gregor Mendel is known as the Father of Genetics. He came up with the first breakthrough in genetic science. Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian monk, who was fond of growing plants and gardening. He noticed a unique relationship between one generation of plants and the next generation of plants.
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He did the pea plant experiment to prove that genes played an important role in carrying over traits from parents to offsprings. He chose the pea plant because it grew fast, and it had a short lifecycle. It was easy to observe the changes and patterns of development in several generations of pea plants because of this. In his life time, Mendel grew more than thirty thousand pea plants, and studied the concept of inheritance and hereditary in pea plants in depth.
Gregor Mendel’s breakthrough in the laws of hereditary helped Charles Darwin sustain his theories of survival of the fittest and the origin of species.
Mendel discovered that by crossing tall and short pea plants, the offsprings were tall instead of getting a medium-sized offsprings. The result was always more or less similar no matter how many plants he crossed. Also, he called the genes the heredity units. Genes is a modern name for the concept that was discovered by Mendel.
He then published a scientific paper showing that hereditary units (or genes) were expressed either as dominant characteristics or recessive characteristics. He then worked on several traits and characteristic features of the pea plant that manifested in the offsprings which further helped to explain his theory, and also led him to postulate the now-famous laws of hereditary.
Mendel’s laws of hereditary are still being used in modern day genetics. It is considered as one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history even today. Ever since then, the world knew that there is something that is known as genes, and it was these genes that caused similarities in generations through attributes and common features.
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