This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Johann Mendel, who discovered the missing component of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the genetic mechanism of trait inheritance. The… Click to show full abstract
This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Johann Mendel, who discovered the missing component of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the genetic mechanism of trait inheritance. The eight articles in this Special Feature collection cover various aspects of Mendel’s life, his work, and his contribution to science, with a special focus on his impact in evolutionary biology. In this introductory paper, we provide the context for the eight papers, as well as summarize how Mendel’s work has contributed to the development of modern evolutionary biology. In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1) proposed what he called “descent with modification”: what we now refer to as evolution through natural selection. Today, we can describe Darwin’s idea as a theory that requires a population with individuals having the following three properties:
               
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