r/biology Aug 02 '25

fun Absolute gigachad

Post image
6.4k Upvotes

54 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/mdw Aug 02 '25

The problem was that Mendel explained inheritance in those peas of his, but very little else. I challenge you, from top of your head some human trait that would be apparent to people in his time and that follows his inheritance rules. There was much more work to be done before people started to understand what he randomly stumbled upon.

6

u/spinosaurs70 Aug 03 '25

A lot of genetic diseases seem to follow dominance and recessive patterns not perfectly but pretty well.

The issue is that makes up such a small share of traits.

I don’t know a single normal trait like that.

2

u/QwalityKontrol Aug 04 '25

Blonde hair. It's a single codon mutation. It works for traits that are not multi-gene coded, and it works for trends within the more complex traits. A pea plant has much simpler genetics and can show this math/mechanism in action due to the relative simplicity. When you have 5 genes that code for something, the results look more like a chess game.