If Darwin had known about Mendel’s work, he would have had a rebuttal to the swamping argument. Recessive traits do not get blended away in Mendel’s scheme; they disappear in hybrids that also carry the dominating trait, but reemerge in later generations when the gametes rearrange themselves and form a few double-recessive offspring. Mendel’s experiments, which revealed the random and independent transmittal of different traits, threw notions of blending inheritance into question. Character traits cannot be inherited separately—a condition that would later become known as “segregation”—and at
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