Mendel
Where does a child unlike its parents come from?
That time, that place
An Augustinian friar in Brno. He failed the teaching examination twice, and in between was sent to the University of Vienna to study physics and statistics. That turned out to be decisive: he would approach the problem like a physicist, not a naturalist.
Why this question
Heredity was understood then as paint mixing: the parents' traits blend and the offspring falls between.
There is something odd about that. If everything keeps blending, differences should fade each generation until everyone is alike. They do not. A trait that vanished can reappear in a grandchild.
What was found
He chose peas: they self-pollinate, their traits fall cleanly into two, and a generation is short. Round or wrinkled, tall or short.
Over eight years he grew twenty-eight thousand plants. And crucially, he counted.
Crossing two different peas, the first generation showed only one of the traits. The other seemed to have vanished. But crossing that generation with itself, the vanished trait returned in exactly one quarter. Three to one.
The same ratio repeated across trait after trait. So traits do not blend. They pass in pairs, like particles, and one merely masks the other rather than erasing it.
Parental traits blend like paint into an average
A three-to-one ratio recurring across trait after trait
The paper appeared in a local journal; he sent forty offprints to scholars and heard nothing. He became abbot, was consumed by administration, and died. In 1900 three researchers independently reached the same laws and then found his paper