Mendel's Laws (1866)

Mendel planted peas in the garden of his monastery and carried out crossbreeding experiments using traits such as seed shape, cotyledons, and seed coat color. In 1866, he published a paper entitled gExperiments on Plant Hybrids.h

The three laws of inheritance discovered by Mendel:
  1. Law of Dominance
    Among the traits inherited from the parents, some are more likely to appear (dominant traits) in the first filial generation (F1), while others are less likely to appear (recessive traits).
  2. Law of Segregation
    Recessive traits can reappear in the second filial generation (F2).
  3. Law of Independent Assortment
    Different traits, for example the color and wrinkling of peas, are inherited independently.
His achievements in this research were ignored at the time.
If Darwin had known Mendel's laws, he could probably have used them to support the theory of natural selection and more easily refute Lamarck's theory.






At that time, many people believed that parental traits blended together in offspring like mixing liquids. Therefore, it was thought that if long-necked and short-necked giraffes continued to interbreed, their traits would gradually blend and dilute, eventually producing descendants with the same neck length.

For this reason, Lamarck's theory was considered more convincing than Darwin's theory of natural selection at that time.