Who formulated the laws of inheritance using pea plants?

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar who grew around 28,000 pea plants over eight years in a monastery garden in what is now Brno, tracking seven traits with clean either-or outcomes - tall or short, round or wrinkled, yellow or green.

He published in 1866 and it went essentially unread for 34 years. Darwin never saw it, which is one of the great near-misses in science, because inheritance was precisely the gap in natural selection - Darwin had no mechanism for how traits passed on and worried about blending, in which any new variation would be diluted away. Mendel's particulate inheritance solves exactly that.

There is a persistent statistical awkwardness. Ronald Fisher showed in 1936 that Mendel's ratios are closer to the theoretical prediction than chance should allow - the data are too good. Explanations range from unconscious bias in classifying ambiguous plants, to a gardener helping, to Mendel stopping counting when the numbers looked right. Nobody credible thinks he fabricated the conclusion, which is correct; the discomfort is about how the numbers got quite so tidy.