History of genetics History of genetics The history of genetics dates from the classical era with contributions by Hippocrates, Aristotle and Epicurus. Modern biology began with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel. His work on pea plants, published in 1866,what is now Mendelian inheritance. Some theories of heredity suggest in the centuries before and for several decades after Mendel's work. The year 1900 marked the "rediscovery of Mendel" by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, and by 1915 the basic principles of Mendelian genetics had been applied to a wide variety of organisms—most notably the fruit fly
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