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When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he suggested that traits could be inherited, and that natural selection could affect which traits were passed down. Around the same time, Gregor Mendel was conducting his pea plant experiments, which he published in 1866. Mendel gave a few lectures on his findings about genetics in pea plants, but no one seemed to grasp the importance for understanding how traits are inherited.
Meanwhile, based on Darwin’s writings, biologists thought natural selection happened in populations, but didn’t have an idea how it worked at the level of organisms. There wasn’t an understanding of genetics and how traits could be passed on to offspring until Mendel’s work was rediscovered around 1900 and independently reproduced by multiple researchers.
After that, biologists started working on how to fit genetics and natural selection together in a theory of evolution. Genetics ...
