Genetics is important to our understanding of selection for at least three reasons: first, although the concept of selection seems obvious, it was not until selection was linked to Mendelian genetics ...

Pity Gregor Mendel. Far enough ahead of his peers that his work wasn’t appreciated in his own lifetime. When the world was finally ready to deal with his results, the scientific community almost ...

It’s a commonly observed habit in families to draw likenesses between members of the youngest generation and their ancestors. “This baby has a smile like her mother,” one would say, or, “He has ...

The year was 1900. Three European botanists — one Dutch, one German and one Austrian — all reported results from breeding experiments in plants. Each claimed that they had independently discovered ...

For more than a century, Mendelian genetics has shaped how we think about inheritance: one gene, one trait. It is a model that still echoes through textbooks—and one that is increasingly reaching its ...

Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when their predecessors carried ...

One of the more interesting questions about the history of science is whether certain theories are inevitable. Given a set of data and the prevalent intellectual environment, does it become difficult ...