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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
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Gregor Mendel publishes "Experiments in Plant Hybridisation," establishing the basic laws of inheritance
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Johann Friedrich Miescher extracts what comes to be known as DNA from the nuclei of white blood cells
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Francis Galton offers a statistical approach to understanding inheritance
