Biology, Eighth Edition (Raven)

Chapter 12: Patterns of Inheritance

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the historical background for Mendel’s pea experiments.
• Know the key details in Mendel’s experiments that enabled him to postulate his laws of inheritance where others had failed.
• State Mendel’s model of heredity and Sutton’s theory of chromosomal inheritance.
• Understand how gene segregation and independent assortment are different but yet related.
• Calculate expected phenotypic and genotypic ratios from various crosses using the Punnett square method.
• Explain the experimental rationale behind the classical testcross. Explain how Mendelian inheritance changes with respect to continuous variation, pleiotropic genes, lack of complete dominance, environmental modifications of genes, and epistasis