Mendel eventually carried out his crosses in this particular set of experiments for four more generations, so he had a total of six generations derived by self-fertilizing hybrids. In each generation the seed traits broke down into three types: pure dominants (meaning their descendants were all dominant themselves), pure recessives (meaning their descendants were all recessive), and a group that revealed themselves to be hybrids only after giving rise to both kinds of offspring, always in that same 3:1 ratio. With the new information derived from successive generations, Mendel could refine the
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