The Construction of Mendel’s Laws

While ‘‘Mendel’s Laws’ ’ are generally taught as natural facts, they are actually pedagogical constructions, which originated in a series of lectures at Princeton in 1916. What accounts for their popularity? Any modern textbook of genetics, or even of general biology or biological anthropology, presents the funda-mentals of heredity in a stereotypical fashion, beginning with the two laws of heredity derived from the work on peas by the monk of Brünn, Gregor Johann Mendel. These two laws are ‘‘segregation’ ’ and ‘‘independent assort-ment,’ ’ to wit: These observations of discrete inheri-tance and the segregation of alleles ar