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Mendel and the peas he planted, crossed, and counted started a revolution. It was quiet, at first, though Mendel knew he’d found something significant.
The degree of that significance was likely not clear to him at the time, however. 150 years ago, he presented and published it in a local journal and was then “lost” to the world. It’s more accurate to say it just didn’t spark anything in anyone until the right eyes and brain hit upon it. 34 years later, 4 brains rediscovered his work.
Despite being brief, Mendel’s foray into the life sciences was influential. And if Darwin had known about Mendel’s work, it may have answered some of his unknowns about his theory of natural selection that still lacked a clear method for “descent with modification” generation to generation. It would take until well into the 20th century for Mendel’s discrete factors of inheritance to be mapped onto DNA, to learn just what those heritable packets of information were, and the physical structure of genes.
Read full, original post: 150 Years After Mendel Published His Foray Into Life Science.
