Pleiotropy correlations and responses to selection most often exemplify pleiotropy. Pleiotropic traits had been previously recognized in the scientific community but had not been experimented on until Gregor Mendel's 1866 pea plant experiment. Mendel recognized that certain pea plant traits (seed coat color, flower color, and axial spots) seemed to be inherited together; however, their correlation to a single gene has never been proven. The term "pleiotropie" was first coined by Ludwig Plate in his Festschrift, which was published in 1910. He originally defined pleiotropy as occurring when "several characteristics are dependent upon ... [inheritance]; these characteristics will then always appear
Johann Karl Nestler stock animals and their offspring Nestler hoped to explain the (genetic history). Examination of the records of the ancestors of the best breeding animals, called by Nestler "developmental history" () was for him the reverse side of the same coin. According to Wood and Orel the search for rules of heredity in sheep created an atmosphere of enquiry about heredity in general, which had influence on later work of Gregor Johann Mendel, himself a student at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1840–43. Nestler was also a very active member of the "Moravian-Silesian Society for Advancement of Agriculture" (, in which