<\/p>\n Mendel was actively discouraged from pursuing his research. His bishop giggled whenever Mendel told of his scientific experiments, according to a letter his abbot Cyril Napp wrote to him in 1859<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “He asked if I though [sic] it seemly for a man of your intellectual attainments to be plodding in a pea patch, prying into the germinal proclivities of peas. He suggested that pea propagation was a subject less worthy of your curiosity than, say, the writings of the Church Fathers or the Doctrine of Grace. My dear Brother Mendel, as sympathetic as I am to your researches [sic], we can ill afford to have the monastery made the laughingstock of the diocese.”<\/p>\n But Mendel was undeterred from his research \u2014 not because of a deep-seated interest in plants, but because he wanted to reveal the principles of inheritance.<\/p>\n He had chosen to study the plants of this unassuming legume for a number of reasons. First, pea plants reproduced quickly and well in both pots and in the ground, according to an 1866 monograph<\/a> he wrote about his research. Second, they seemed to have clear traits they passed along to their offspring \u2014 such as pink, white or red flowers \u2014 and the hybrids were perfectly fertile.<\/p>\n Finally, “accidental impregnation by foreign pollen, if it occurred during the experiments and were not recognized, would lead to entirely erroneous conclusions,” he wrote.<\/p>\n \n Mendel, who was an ordained Catholic priest, conducted his research on pea plant genetics over the course of eight years, using the garden plot at his monastery. (Image credit: Public Domain)<\/p>\n He identified several distinct traits to track \u2014 such as the color of the peas and their pods, the positions of the flowers, and the lengths of the stems \u2014 and then crossbred those with differing characteristics. Then, he let each distinct type of plant “self-breed” for two years, showing that the traits continued to be passed along to offspring.<\/p>\n Next, he crossbred those plants and crossbred the resulting hybrids. He painstakingly tallied all of the ways traits were inherited, denoting different traits from each parent with simple labels like Aa, Bb and Cc.<\/p>\n By analyzing the mathematical patterns in each subsequent generation, he deduced the basic principles of inheritance. First, he noted that some traits were transmitted in discrete units, or “particles” \u2014 if you cross a green-pea plant with a yellow-pea plant, you get either green or yellow offspring, not yellowish-green ones.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n He also concluded that some traits were inherited in a “dominant” pattern. For instance, if plants bred for generations to have only smooth seeds were bred with those that had wrinkly seeds, the offspring would always have smooth seeds<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Mendel crossbred hybrids, he noticed something strange: Most of the plants would look smooth, but about a quarter would look wrinkled. He deduced that the wrinkly trait was instead passed on in a “recessive” manner and that the trait actually came from the grandfather plant’s generation.<\/p>\n \n A schematic of pea plant color by generation (F1, F2, F3). The “dark” flower color here is dominant. The first generation of hybrids is all dark, while a quarter of the F2 and later generation crossbreeds will have light-colored flowers. (Image credit: ullstein Bild Dtl\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Mendel wasn’t content to study one “particle” at a time. He also crossbred plants that were hybrids for two different traits and learned that each trait was transmitted separately, which is now known as the principle of segregation.<\/p>\n Mendel’s work wasn’t recognized in his lifetime. And although Mendel is often known as the “father of genetics,” the term “genetics” was not coined until the early 1900s, when English biologist William Bateson rediscovered Mendel’s forgotten work and realized its overarching significance<\/a>.<\/p>\n Soon after, some argued Mendel’s data was “too good to be true<\/a>,” and that he must have fabricated his results. A 2020 study<\/a> put that idea to rest, showing that given the seeds available then, what Mendel knew, and how seeds were classified then, his results were in fact what you’d expect.<\/p>\n Decades later, research would reveal that inheritance isn’t as simple as Mendel’s pea plants would suggest \u2014 some genes are inherited in a sex-linked manner, and other traits have incomplete “penetrance,” meaning they don’t always manifest the same way. And in early 2026 research revealed that some disease-causing genes we believed were dominant<\/a> don’t operate like we thought, which may challenge some of the fundamental tenets of Mendelian inheritance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Milestone: Principles of inheritance discovered Date: Feb. 8 and March 8, 1865 Where: Brno, in what is now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-461405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/WE9KeFALSESDcWy6owZBgD.jpg\")
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