Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is the pattern of heredity following the principles first described by Gregor Mendel in 1866, rediscovered independently by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak in 1900. Its core principles — the segregation of alleles during gamete formation and the independent assortment of genes — provided the missing mechanism for Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which had lacked a credible theory of heredity. The integration of Mendelian inheritance with population genetics in the 1930s created the mathematical foundation of the Modern Synthesis, though subsequent discoveries of epigenetic inheritance, horizontal gene transfer, and cytoplasmic inheritance have shown that Mendelian patterns describe only one layer of a more complex hereditary system.