Practice question

Mendel's experiments succeeded largely because he selected traits showing discontinuous variation with clearly separable phenotypic classes controlled by single major genes. Pea characters like seed shape, flower colour and pod form segregated into discrete categories without intermediate blending, enabling counting and ratio calculation. Polygenic continuous traits would have produced overlapping distributions obscuring segregation, variable environment would increase noise, linked genes would distort independent assortment, focus on unlinked Mendelian discontinuous characters was key to discovering laws. This principle is routinely tested in NEET, CBSE 11-12, CUET, CSIR-NET, GATE and MSc Genetics examinations requiring clear conceptual distinction.