Gregor Mendel presents his research results from his work on peas to the Nature Research Society of Brünn, initiating the modern genetics research program. In this presentation, Mendel introduces the concepts of dominant and recessive hereditary “factors.” Mendel also proposes two laws of heredity to explain his results, the Law of Segregation (that organisms inherit two factors from its parents, but only passes one of these factors on to its offspring) and the Law of Independent Assortment (that the combinations of traits in the offspring do not always match the combinations of traits in the parents).
On this day in 1865…
