Final answer:
Mendel conducted experiments on pea plants, focusing on one characteristic at a time. His findings showing dominant and recessive patterns led to the Mendel's first law of segregation. Subsequent experiments with multiple traits led to his second law, the law of independent assortment, challenging the blending theory of inheritance.
Step-by-step explanation:
Mendel's Experiments and His Collection of Data
Johann Gregor Mendel's experiments involving pea plants laid the foundation for the field of genetics. His approach was methodical, applying mathematical analysis to biological questions. In his first set of experiments, Mendel focused on one characteristic at a time, such as flower color. By cross-pollinating purple and white-flowered plants (the P generation), and observing the subsequent F1 generation, he discovered that all offspring exhibited the purple flower trait.
In these experiments, Mendel was surprised to find that the F1 generation did not show a blend of the parent traits, as was the common belief of the time, but instead, one trait was dominant. Further breeding of the F1 generation produced an F2 generation with both purple and white flowers, showing dominant and recessive patterns. The law of segregation, or Mendel's first law, arose from these observations, stating that alleles separate so that each gamete carries only one allele for each trait.
Mendel's second set of experiments involved tracking two characteristics simultaneously, such as seed shape and color. This led to Mendel's second law, the law of independent assortment, which asserts that alleles for different traits are distributed to gametes independently. Mendel's systematic breeding and observation of nearly 30,000 pea plants revealed that traits are transmitted from parents to offspring independently and in predictable patterns, which fundamentally contradicted the blending theory of inheritance.