Lec 7 MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004
Good morning. Good morning. Yes. So I want to pick up where we were last time. We talked last time about Mendel's elegant experimental design. And not just elegant but very careful, too, in having organisms that bred true. And a lot of work went into that. We talked about his observations and his really great choice to count. We talked about his ability to look at numbers that were approximate and somehow intuit what was interesting about them. Namely, he had to take rough numbers and say, hmm, I think this is a 3:1 ratio, although that was an abstraction, but a very good on his part. And it's hard to know when to make those leaps and when you're kidding yourself, but Mendel got a lot of data. I didn't mention that he worked on not just round and wrinkled, but he worked on seven different traits across pea plants. All seven showed these very consistent properties. There was a recessive and a dominant phenotype a...