Gregor Mendel is one of the most important figures in science. Taught in school classrooms across the globe, his discoveries in the field of genetics have been unrivaled in their sheer significance and historical precedence. Mendel demonstrated, with rigorous experimentation and breeding of pea plants, the exact functions of the dominant and recessive genes shaping our lives.
Dominance and recessiveness refers to how inherited alleles, or different copies of individual genes, relate to each other. A dominant allele only requires one instance in your genetic makeup to express in your traits, such as eye color. Whereas a recessive allele requires two instances of it to be inherited together. These are best demonstrated, and most commonly recognized, through the Punnett square diagram.
