Keeping the peas. Mendel did not set out to conduct the first well-controlled and brilliantly-designed experiments in genetics. His goal was to create hybrid pea plants and observe the outcome.

Next, Mendel went through his data and examined each characteristic separately. He compared the total numbers of round versus wrinkled and yellow versus green peas, as shown in Tables 1 and 2.

Ironically, Darwin never found out. The results of Mendel's carefully designed and meticulously executed experiments, which involved nearly 30,000 pea plants followed over eight generations ...

Gregor Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments with pea plants, long before the discovery of DNA and genes. Mendel was an Augustinian monk at St Thomas’s Abbey ...