ABSTRACT
The ambition of sociologists to discover societal laws, laws informed by evolutionary theory, came to nought: no laws were discovered. The Austrian monk Gregor Mendel independently discovered an underlying logic of inheritance. His statistical analysis of the data from meticulous cross-pollinating experiments with pea plants revealed unswerving patterns now known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. Most human features and traits are the result of many genes working in concert passed on to the next generation as a polygenic inheritance. Human reproduction continually delivers inherited variation by "mistakes" occurring when genes are copied, through recombination when cells divide to form new pairs of chromosomes. The chief lacuna in evolutionary theory was the missing explanation for inheritance, the explanation for how features advantageous to survival and reproduction were passed on from parent to offspring.
