Final answer:
Mendel's laws of inheritance provide a basic framework for understanding genetic inheritance but do not account for all patterns such as incomplete dominance, where the phenotype of heterozygotes is an intermediate of homozygous phenotypes.
Step-by-step explanation:
For most sexually reproducing organisms, Mendel's laws explain the pattern of passage of genes from parent to offspring and provide a foundational understanding of inheritance.
However, Mendelian genetics does not strictly account for the patterns of inheritance of many traits, as alternative inheritance patterns exist.
Since Mendel's experiments with pea plants, it has been discovered that traits do not always follow the simple dominant and recessive patterns he described.
Incomplete dominance is one such example, where the phenotype of the heterozygote is intermediate between the phenotypes of the two homozygotes, deviating from Mendel's law of dominance.
Mendel postulated the behavior of alleles in terms of dominant and recessive patterns. Nonetheless, episodes of incomplete dominance, among other patterns, represent deviations from these simple Mendelian principles.