Gregor Mendel’s pea-plant experiments established the basic laws of inheritance used in evolutionary biology.
Mendel conducted his best-known experiments at the Augustinian monastery in Brno between 1856 and 1863. He tracked traits such as seed shape, seed color, flower color, and plant height across generations of garden peas. His controlled crosses revealed predictable numerical patterns.
Mendel proposed that organisms carry discrete hereditary factors, now called genes, and that paired factors separate when reproductive cells form. His work supplied a foundation for understanding how heritable variation is transmitted, although he did not know about DNA or chromosomes.
Mendel published his results in 1866, but the importance of the paper was not widely recognized until around 1900. Modern evolutionary biology combines Mendelian inheritance with natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and other population-level processes.