Because Darwin did not know about the work of Gregor Mendel, he could not explain how organisms pass heritable traits to their offspring. In looking at genetic variation, what are discrete characters, and what are quantitative characters?

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Taylor Chung

Biology

25 December, 20:46

Because Darwin did not know about the work of Gregor Mendel, he could not explain how organisms pass heritable traits to their offspring. In looking at genetic variation, what are discrete characters, and what are quantitative characters?

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Stephany Steele · Answer 1

Both Darwin and Mendel proposed their theory at the same time but they never communicated with each other. They both explained the population and studied the variation between them and in them.

The variation within a population could be of two types: the discontinuous traits and the quantitative trait.

A discrete trait refers to a trait that is usually controlled by only one gene that is only two alleles or two variants are observed in the population whereas the quantitative trait is a trait that can be determined by more than one gene like the variation in height.