Summary

Gregor Mendel’s biography is a great example of how a scientist’s background and identity influences their science. Because of his background coming from a farming community, with interests in botany, chemistry, and math, Mendel was able to develop two rules of genetics that we still use today: the law of equal segregation and the law of independent assortment.

The law of equal segregation gives us the principles we use to construct a Punnett Square and calculate the probability of offspring phenotypes. The law of independent assortment allows us to calculate offspring phenotypes derived from multiple genes at a time, using the multiplication rule of probability.