Earth Sciences 1083F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Zygosity, Meiosis, Mendelian Inheritance
14 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
For thousands of years farmers and herders have been selectively breeding their plants and animals to produce more useful hybrids it was somewhat of a hit or miss process since the actual mechanisms governing inheritance were unknown. Knowledge of these genetic mechanisms finally came as a result of careful laboratory breeding experiments carried out over the last century and a half. By the 1890"s, the invention of better microscopes allowed biologists to discover the basic facts of cell division and sexual reproduction. The focus of genetics research then shifted to understanding what really happens in the transmission of hereditary traits from parents to children. A number of hypotheses were suggested to explain heredity, but gregor mendel, a little known central european monk, was the only one who got it more or less right. His ideas had been published in 1866 but largely went unrecognized until 1900, which was long after his death.
