Gregor Mendel is rightly called the 'father of genetics' because of his early work as a plant breeder and mathematician. His experiments breeding pea plants were meticulous for the time. His results and how he recorded his experiments are the same used today to study genetics, to understand selective breeding and to understand the evolution of a species over time.

Mendel bred pea plants, the seeds showed specific phenotypic characteristics that could be tracked through generations of breeding - that means the pea plants had a physical type that you could see - in his case it was wrinkly seeds, smooth seeds, yellow seeds, green seeds, short plants, tall plants, red flowers and white flowers.

As he bred the different phenotypes together he recorded the type and proportion of offspring, reaching a number of conclusions as he did so. The most important being the principle of segregation explained below

"According to the principle of segregation, for any particular trait, the pair of alleles of each parent separate and only one allele passes from each parent on to an offspring. Which allele in a parent's pair of alleles is inherited is a matter of chance."
http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm

We now know that this segregation of alleles ( forms of a gene ) occurs during the process of sex cell formation. We call these alleles either recessive or dominate and understand they are passed to offspring by their parents. By studying the phenotype he was giving us an clue into the genotype of the species, which we now understand much better after Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA.

In terms of evolution these alleles give each species the ability to change over time as the proportion of recessive/dominate genes changes in a population. If a recessive gene helps the species survive the proportion of the recessive gene in the resultant population changes giving the benefit of survival to more offspring, eventually changing the population.

I wouldn't normally link a Wiki article to a science question but they do have a perfect example of this evolution in action - the Peppered moth. Its well written and a great example of recessive/dominate genetic evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

A good video to watch explaining Mendel Genetic Theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVl8OH_7QSc

See the sources below for more information of Mendel Genetics
Source(s):
http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm
http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc431/mendel/mendel1.htm

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