Mendelism

Mendelism is the name given to the entire body of concepts that Gregor Johann Mendel established through his original research on plant hybridisation in the garden pea. Because these concepts form the conceptual bedrock on which all of modern genetics is built, Mendel is honoured as the Father of Genetics. This section works through Mendel's own story - who he was, why the garden pea was such a well-chosen experimental system, and why his particular approach to the work succeeded where earlier, less rigorous breeding observations had failed - before laying out the vocabulary (allele, homozygous, heterozygous, dominant, recessive) that Mendel's work introduced and that the rest of the chapter, and the rest of genetics, continues to use. It then states the two rules Mendel derived purely from counting the offspring of his crosses: the Law of Dominance and the Law of S …