Mention the contribution of Gregor Mendel ? Mention the reasons for his success.

Explanation

Gregor Mendel, conducted hybridisation experiments on garden peas for seven years (1856-1863) and proposed the laws of inheritance in living organisms.
= During Mendel.s investigations into inheritance patterns it was for the first time that statistical analysis and mathematical logic were applied to problems in biology.
= His experiments had a large sampling size which gave greater credibility to the data that he collected.
= Also the confirmation of his inferences from experiments on successive generations of his test plants, proved that his results pointed to general rule of inheritance rather than being unsubstantiated ideas.
= Mendel investigated characters in the garden pea plant that were manifested as two opposing traits e.g. tall or dwarf plants, yellow or green seeds.
= This allowed him to set up a basic framework of rules governing inheritance, which was expanded on by later scientists to account for all the diverse natural observations and the complexity inherent in them.
= Mendel conducted such artificial pollination/cross pollination experiments using several true - breeding pea lines.
= A true - breeding line is one that having undergone continuous self pollination, shows the stable trait inheritance and expression for several generation.
= Mendel selected 14 true-breeding pea plant varieties as pairs which were similar except for one character with contrasting traits.
= Some of the contrasting traits selected were smooth or wrinkled seeds, yellow or green seeds, smooth or inflated pods, green or yellow pods and tall or dwarf plants.