heredity
Why do living things vary, and how do the variations occur? This is heredity summed up in one sentence. To complicate things there seems to be no reliable rules governing the way a given trait is handed down from parent to offspring. Such as when a child, with two parents that have black hair, is born with red hair. Baffled by things such as this people started to fall back on the idea that heredity is transmitted by blood. Along with everyone else Darwin was also plagued by this problem for years. Darwin experimented with garden peas and other plants. Darwin could never figure out a pattern or order of inheritance, mainly because we now know that one doesn’t exist. Towards his final formulation an Austrian monk named Gregor Johann Mendel began the first of his experiments. Mendel set out to prove that inheritance is not chaotic or chance but a matter of law. Mendel was born July 22, 1822 in a village in what is now Czechoslovakia. Throughout his childhood Mendel was highly intelligent and was recommended for higher schooling. Due to lack of money he never got to experience higher education but eventually attended a monastery. This is where his intelligence got the best of him. In a small strip of garden Mendel began experimenting with crosses in flowers. He soon discovered that when he crossed certain varieties the same characteristics kept appearing with surprising regularity.