Question

Mendel's rules do not correctly predict patterns of inheritance for tightly linked genes or the inheritance of alleles that show incomplete dominance or epistasis. Does this mean that his hypotheses are incorrect?
A. Yes, because they are relevant to only a small number of organisms and traits.
B. Yes, because not all data support his hypothesis.
C. No, because he was not aware of meiosis or the chromosome theory of inheritance.
D. No, it just means that his hypothesis is limited to certain conditions.

Answer 1

Hint: Mendel proposed the law of inheritance where he proposed law of dominance, law of segregation and law of independent assortment in which he did not assume special conditions like incomplete dominance or codominance as they were discovered later.


Complete step by step solution:
Gregor Mendel discovered the rules of inheritance through his research on pea plants. He looked into the idea that genes are passed from each parent as separate, paired units. Mendel discovered the separation of parental genes and how they showed up as dominant or recessive traits in the offspring. To demonstrate that traits in plants are inherited from parents, Gregor Mendel performed tests on pea plants.

He gave three laws of inheritance which are stated as:

• • Law of dominance – In the heterozygous condition, the allele which is dominated over other acquired alleles, which is known as a dominant trait, is only expressed in the phenotype

• Law of independent assortment – The pair of alleles segregates independently of other pairs of a trait during gamete formation.

• Law of segregation – As the offsprings acquire one allele from each parent shows that the alleles are segregated during gamete formation.

Mendel did not talk about the cases in which the alleles did not segregate from each other i.e. they were tightly linked. So we can say that Mendel’s laws were limited to certain conditions but they were not incorrect.

Hence, the correct option is D. No, it just means that his hypothesis are limited to certain conditions.

Note:
The thing to note here is that Mendel gave the law of inheritance when he experimented on a plate of pea and he didn’t experiment about the different conditions when the alleles are tightly linked and do not show segregation. T.H. Morgan and other scientists later studied these conditions.