BIOL 306 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Gregor Mendel, Ronald Fisher, Normal Distribution
Document Summary
He hypothesized that if a trait (such as height) is genetic, then if you take only the tall people and look at their offspring, then their offspring should also be tall. Prof. dent: he picked a bunch of different groups (poets, military commanders, judges, etc) that he decided were geniuses. Developed standard deviation and the correlation coefficient to be able to measure human traits and better understand heredity: he was concerned that the quality of the human gene pool of britain was declining. He hoped that a better understanding of heredity would allow betterment of society through selective breeding. Coined the term eugenics: one argument in favor of eugenics was the obvious genetic inferiority of other races. Ra fisher (1890 1962) and the reconciliation of mendelian and continuous: around the beginning of the 1900s, mendel"s laws were rediscovered and confirmed in independent experiments on fruit flies and various other organisms.