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Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. Although supported by a mass of circumstantial evidence, his theory of natural selection does not include a testable hypothesis for discovering the mechanisms of heredity -
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel publishes "Experiments in Plant Hybridisation," establishing the basic laws of inheritance -
Johann Friedrich Miescher
Johann Friedrich Miescher extracts what comes to be known as DNA from the nuclei of white blood cells -
Francis Galton
Francis Galton offers a statistical approach to understanding inheritance
