Uniparental inheritance the days of an Augustinian priest known as Gregor Johann Mendel. The soon-to-be "father of modern genetics" spent his days conducting hybridization experiments on pea plants("Pisum sativum") in his monastery's garden. During a period of seven years (1856 to 1863), Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants which led to him deducing the two famous generalizations known as Mendel's Laws of Heredity. The first, the law of segregation, states that "when any individual produces gametes, the copies of a gene separate, so that each gamete receives only one copy". The second, the law of independent assortment, states that "alleles
History of Western civilization founded. Many Westerners became less religious in this period, although a majority of people still held traditional Christian beliefs. The 1859 publication of "On the Origin of Species", by the English naturalist Charles Darwin, provided an alternative hypothesis for the development, diversification, and design of human life to the traditional poetic scriptural explanation known as Creationism. According to Darwin, only the organisms most able to adapt to their environment survived while others became extinct. Adaptations resulted in changes in certain populations of organisms which could eventually cause the creation of new species. Modern genetics started with Gregor Johann Mendel, a