Today Google is celebrating the 189th birthday of Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar and scientist who is known as the “father of modern genetics”.

You may be wondering what this has to do with peas…

Mendel studied genitic variation in pea plants. Between 1856 and 1863 he cultivated nearly 30, 000 pea plants.

His study showed that one in four plants showed recessive genes, two showed hybrids of recessive and dominant genes and the other showed only the dominant gene.

These findings led him to make two generalisations which are known as Medel’s Laws of Inheritance.