Mendel's peas
The rules of inheritance are worked out in a monastery garden and ignored for 34 years.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Gregor Mendel breeds some 28,000 pea plants and shows in 1866 that traits are carried by discrete factors, one from each parent, some dominant over others — inheritance is particulate rather than a blending of parental characteristics. His paper is read by almost nobody. It is rediscovered independently in 1900, and combined with natural selection in the 1930s to form the modern synthesis. Darwin never saw it, and blending inheritance was a serious problem for his theory.