It is hard to believe that Mendel could have envisioned this notion clearly in the autumn of 1857. It is easier to imagine that he reconstructed the idea in hindsight, after he saw how the crops of 1858 and 1859 and maybe even 1860 actually looked. But the explanation he finally arrived at, long before he formalized his thoughts in the two-part lecture delivered in early 1865, was this: that for every four seeds resulting from self-fertilization of a yellow-green hybrid, one of the yellow peas could be designated as A, or pure yellow; two were yellow but also carried the potential to produce
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