This Day in History...
They're alike as two peas in a pod. Gregor Mendel wouldn't have said that. Born on this date in 1822, Mendel was a monk who liked to spend his spare time experimenting with garden peas and other plants. He planted and grew some 30,000 different pea plants, analyzing their height, size, color and pod shape. He cross-pollinated them and noted the results. By observing and analyzing, he determined that hereditary factors and genes are responsible for many of the characteristics of the different kinds of peas. Though he expected to prove that a plant was a merging of both parent plants — in other words, a tall plant and a short plant would produce a medium-sized one — he, in fact, determined that sometimes the physical characteristics of one of the plants were dominant, while those of the other parent plant were recessive.
