Mendel presents the laws of inheritance
- Date
- 1865 (published 1866)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Austrian Empire (Brünn / Brno, Moravia)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
In 1865 the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel presented the results of eight years of breeding experiments with pea plants to the Natural History Society of Brünn (Brno, in the Austrian Empire), publishing them in 1866 as 'Experiments on Plant Hybridisation'.
Cultivating tens of thousands of plants and carefully tracking discrete traits such as flower colour and seed shape, Mendel deduced that inheritance is governed by paired hereditary 'factors' (later called genes) that segregate during reproduction and assort independently of one another. These findings, now known as the laws of segregation and independent assortment, showed that heredity is transmitted in discrete units rather than by blending, and that traits follow predictable statistical ratios across generations. Mendel's quantitative approach was largely ignored during his lifetime, but its rediscovery around 1900 by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak founded the science of genetics. Mendelian inheritance later combined with Darwinian natural selection to produce the modern evolutionary synthesis, making Mendel's monastery garden a cradle of twentieth-century biology.
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Empires active in 1865 (published 1866)
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Third Plague Pandemic begins in Yunnan1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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