Master Breeders
This "wizard of horticulture" created the stoneless plum and the white blackberry
Who is Luther Burbank?
Charles Darwin published this highly influential book outlining natural selection, though he admitted he didn't know how inheritance actually worked.
What is The Origin of Species?
Gregor Mendel grew thousands of these plants in a priory greenhouse to study how traits were passed down.
What are peas?
August Weismann established the germ-line theory, separating temporary somatic body cells from these immortal reproductive cells.
What are germ cells (or sperm and eggs)?
Francis Galton believed this desirable quality, found in notable mathematicians and philosophers, was strongly inherited.
What is talent (or genius)?
This 18th-century English farmer invented the barrel-shaped New Leicester sheep by using "in-and-in" breeding.
Who is Robert Bakewell?
Darwin proposed this provisional hypothesis, suggesting cells cast off invisible particles that gathered in the sexual organs to create offspring.
What is pangenesis?
Mendel discovered that crossing yellow and green hybrids consistently resulted in offspring with this exact mathematical ratio.
What is three-to-one (3:1)?
Weismann famously cut off the tails of these animals for five straight generations to disprove the inheritance of acquired traits.
What are white mice?
In 1871, Francis Galton publicly failed to prove Darwin's theory of pangenesis by transfusing the blood of these animals.
What are rabbits?
Smuggling this highly prized, fine-wooled sheep out of Spain was once a crime punishable by death.
What is the Merino sheep?
This is the specific name Darwin gave to those imaginary, microscopic hereditary atoms coursing through the body.
What are gemmules?
Because the yellow color consistently overshadowed the green in hybrid offspring, Mendel argued that the yellow element was this.
What is dominant?
In the late 1800s, scientists discovered these threadlike structures inside a cell's nucleus that duplicate during cell division.
What are chromosomes?
In the early 1900s, scientist William Bateson officially christened the study of heredity with this modern name.
What is genetics?
In the 1790s, this English breeder applied Bakewell's methods to plants, running hybridization experiments on the common pea.
Who is Thomas Andrew Knight?
To study extreme variations, Darwin built a house in his yard to breed these birds, calling them "the greatest treat"
What are pigeons?
Mendel's mentor disastrously suggested he verify his ratios using this plant, whose strange biology caused the experiments to fail.
What is hawkweed?
Weismann called the mysterious substance inside germ cells that transferred hereditary tendencies from generation to generation by this name.
What is germ-plasm?
Hugo de Vries argued that evolution leaped forward through sudden, dramatic biological changes, a concept he called this.
What is the mutation theory?
Quaker farmer Jesse Hiatt discovered this famous apple variety repeatedly sprouting as a rogue seedling in his Iowa orchard.
What is the Delicious apple?
Darwin turned to the meticulous asylum records of French alienists to study how this specific condition was passed down through human generations.
What is madness (or insanity)?
Mendel's groundbreaking work was ignored until this specific year, when three different scientists stumbled across his old paper.
What is 1900?
To explain heredity in plants, Hugo de Vries theorized that every cell contained invisible particles which he named this, in honor of Darwin.
What are pangenes?
British doctor Archibald Garrod realized that alkaptonuria, a hereditary disease that turns urine black, perfectly matched this historical scientist's 3:1 ratio.
Who is Gregor Mendel?