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RE: Mendel's Lucky Number Seven — The law of genetics that almost wasn't
Mendel really was lucky in that the phenotype expressions in peas were not as complex as those of other creatures. The genetic phenotype inheritance correlation in other creatures does not follow exactly as Mendal's peas due to inflence of environmental factors and the involvement of multiple sections of the DNA storage form in expressing phenotypes/protein synthesis for higher organisms. Thus, melanin pigmentation has varied, analogue phenotypic expression rather than the digital of the peas. Same with Diabetes 2 and other forms of disease like cancer. I guess being a monk, he must have had divine assistance in choosing his experiment candidate to get "lucky."
Very true. But that's partly the reason they call organisms such as peas (or mice, or worms, etc.) "model organisms", cos they lend themselves to easy study. Peas for instance grow fast and produce prodigious progeny compared to most other plants, they're hard to accidentally cross-pollinate with neighbors or wild varieties, etc.
In this respect he wasn't so much lucky, as he chose wisely. And he chose the most virile phenotypes (after experimentation), rejecting many others. It's in choosing the specific phenotypes that all resided on different chromosomes that makes him lucky, though as statisticians say his results also were lucky to show so much consistency.