Question

The phenomenon of incomplete dominance was observed by

• A. Hugo de vries
• B. Correns
• C. Tschermak
• D. None of the above

Answer 1

The correct option is B Correns

Even though Mendel did not try to explain traits that did blend, other scientists eventually did. The discovery of incomplete dominance is usually credited to German Botanist Carl Correns who studied four o'clock plants. Instead of having only two colors of petals on the flowers, there was an intermediate colour that would show up that corresponded to Mendel's genotype ratio of 1:2:1 instead of his pheontype ratio of 3:1. This showed that each genotype corresponded to its own unique phenotype and that the heterozygotes were showing a blend of both alleles instead of one being completely dominant over the other.
Incomplete dominance was actually seen and recorded long before Carl Correns published his works and even before Gregor Mendel worked with his pea plants and published his findings. Since there was no discipline known as Genetics at that time, however, it was not fully explored. Scientists dating back to ancient times discussed the blending of traits in their writings which could be attributed to incomplete dominance. However, it wasn't until after Mendel and Correns that the term "incomplete dominance" came into common usage and the mechanism for how it worked was known.