How did Mensels approach to answering scientific questions differ from that of his contemporaries?
Unlike Darwin, Gregor Mendel simplified the question he wanted to answer. Rather than asking “how do traits pass from parents to their offspring,” he pursued a more scientifically testable question, namely “can I describe and predict how one trait is passed to the next generation?” The answers he got by teasing the question apart illuminated the solutions to the more complex questions of inheritance. Through his meticulous experiments with peas, Mendel’s work began to reveal how complex traits are passed on, and at the nexus of Mendel’s and Darwin’s observations is a model by which “decent with modification” could arise. The power of Mendel’s scientific approach can be seen in the work that led him to his Second Law, the law of independent assortment. The law of independent assortment states that different traits are inherited completely independently of one another. Yet how could Mendel have deduced this if he had no idea of the mechanism by which traits were inherited? When looking a
