Mendel's Influence On The Environment

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4. SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME
According to Morgan (1938) and López-Beltrán (1994), the mystery behind human inheritance has been a long problem which began with the Greek philosophers. Between the time of Aristotle and Mendel time, several theories about human inheritance has been advocated for, part of which are the theories of evolution and influence of the environment by Charles Darwin and Lamarck respectively (Morgan, 1938). As stated in history (Mendel, 2015), before the time of Mendel discovery, there has been a common practice of crossing animals to get the best traits and keeping seeds from a high yielded plant to be sown in the next season. However, the general believe among the biologist of Mendel’s time …show more content…

The work was rediscovered by Williams Bateson, who explained Mendel work in his publication in 1901 (Olby, 2000). Although, according to history there are three other European scientists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak, who discovered independently from their experiment a report similar to that of Mendel’s, but, much was not said about them after the evolution of the modern geneticists (Veuille, 2000). After the rediscovery of Mendel work, several arguments based on the authenticity of the work came up (Pilpel, 2007). Despite some criticisms faced by Mendel’s work, the findings form the basis for modern science of …show more content…

Part of the conclusion of Mendel of work was that the inheritance of each character is determined by ‘‘something’’ passed from parent to offspring which today is referred to as ‘gene’. Mendel work brought the formulation of what is known today as Mendel’s law. Several questions have been answered in medicine using Mendel theories as the basis of genetics (Williams, 2009). Many diseases are now known to be inherited, and can be prevented from being passed on to the next generation by tracing the pedigrees to determine the probability of inheritance by the offsprings. The knowledge of Mendelism is used globally by agriculturalist and plant scientists to improve or get the desired traits in