Mendel on Patterns of Inheritance

It is always funny when you hear someone say your child looks more like you than your spouse or vice versa. While they always are saying things like that, it is interesting to see if they are really thinking about why they are saying that. What traits have been carried onto a child to make them resemble one parent more than the other or maybe a grandfather or grandmother? What controls the traits that a person exhibits and the traits that are hidden deep down, sometimes for generations at a time before being seen again? Gregor Mendel believed there was something that was behind which traits exist in a living being and which do not. He experimented and discovered that traits are often controlled by hereditary units. His experimental methods did vary from the other contemporaries of his time. The first way they varied is by what he concentrated on during his experiments. While many of his contemporaries were trying to focus on everything, he instead decided to focus on just a few select characteristics, seven to be exact. Another variation was where he decided to study hereditary traits. Unlike everyone else, he decided to experiment in a pea garden. He chooses this because peas can be easily manipulated when it comes to breeding experiments. Lastly the use of mathematical analysis as one of his approaches was very uncommon in his time (Pruitt & Underwood, 2006). This novel approach to describing how traits are inherited allowed him to control how the traits were received in the experiments. He was able to control which plants where homozygous and which were heterozygous. Also, by studying the pea plant he was able to have the advantage of simple manipulation that other plants might not have offered. He also was able to have several traits to work with, as pea plants already had several strands and variations (Pruitt & Underwood, 2006). Three main principles his work drew where how hereditary traits are passed from