Episode Details

Gregor Mendel failed his teaching exams twice, yet his meticulous breeding of roughly 28,000 pea plants in a monastery garden uncovered the basic laws of heredity. This deep dive follows him from a peasant farm in Silesia, supported by his sister's sacrificed dowry, into the Augustinian order and his study of physics under Christian Doppler in Vienna.

We explain the three-to-one ratio, dominant and recessive traits, and the laws of segregation and independent assortment, then explore why his work was ignored for 35 years, his failed hawkweed and bee experiments, his years as abbot, and the rediscovery of his paper in 1900. We also weigh R.A. Fisher's claim that his data was too perfect and the 2021 sequencing of his genome.

• Why Mendel joined the monastery and how it gave him an education
• How physics training led him to count and quantify inherited traits
• Why Darwin and other scientists overlooked his 1866 paper
• The Mendelian paradox and modern defenses against fraud accusations
• How his discovery was rediscovered and later confirmed in the pea genome