Begining of human history
Since the begining of human history, people have wondered how traits are inherited from one generation to the next. Although children often look more like one parent than the other, most offspring seem to be a blend of the characteristics of both parent. Centuries of breeding of domestic plants and animals had shown that useful traits - speed in horses, strength in oxen, and larger fruis in crops - can be accentuated by contolled mating. However, there was no scientific way to prdict the outcome of a cross between two particular parents. It wasn't until 1865 that an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel found that individual traits are determined by discrete factors, leter know as genes, which are inherited from the parents. His rigorous approach transformed agricultural breeding from an art to a science. He started with parents of known generetic backround - to provide a baseline against which to compare paterns of inheritance in the rersulting offspring. Then he carefully counted the numbers of individuals showing the various traits in successive generations of offspring.