Gregor Mendel

Overview

Mendel was an Augustinian friar in Brno who crossed pea plants for eight years and, unusually for a naturalist of his time, counted the offspring. By choosing traits with two clean alternatives, such as round or wrinkled seeds, and by working with thousands of plants, he found the ratios that reveal discrete hereditary units: a trait absent in one generation returns in a quarter of the next. He read his paper in 1865 and published it in 1866, and it was almost entirely ignored until three botanists independently reached the same conclusions around 1900. The paper is short, arithmetical rather than mathematical, and is the best demonstration in biology of what careful counting can establish; read it in translation before reading any textbook chapter on genetics.

Where to start reading

• Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden 1866

  Read to the Brno natural history society in 1865 and published the following year, it reports eight years of pea crosses and states the ratios that imply discrete hereditary units. The Gutenberg text linked here is the German original; English translations under the title Experiments in Plant Hybridisation are widely available.

  Read it on Project Gutenberg

Part of

• Genetics

Sources

1. Gregor Mendel Wikipedia
2. Gregor Mendel: A Private Scientist Nature Education Scitable
3. Mendelian inheritance Wikipedia