<P> Blending inheritance was also clearly incompatible with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection . The engineer Fleeming Jenkin used this to attack natural selection in his 1867 review of Darwin's On the Origin of Species . Jenkin noted, correctly, that if inheritance were by blending, any beneficial trait that might arise in a lineage would have "blended away" long before natural selection had time to act . The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins commented that "blending inheritance is incompatible...with obvious fact . If it were really true that variation disappeared, every generation should be more uniform than the previous one . By now, all individuals should be as indistinguishable as clones", and that Darwin should have said as much to Jenkin . The problem was not with natural selection, but with blending, and in Dawkins's view, Darwin should have settled for saying that the mechanism of inheritance was unknown, but certainly non-blending . </P> <P> Blending inheritance was dismissed by the eventual widespread acceptance, after his death, of Gregor Mendel's theory of particulate inheritance, which he had presented in Experiments on Plant Hybridization (1865). In 1892, August Weismann set out the idea of a hereditary material, which he called the germ plasm, confined to the gonads and independent of the rest of the body (the soma). In Weismann's view, the germ plasm formed the body, but the body did not influence the germ plasm, except indirectly by natural selection . This contradicted both Darwin's pangenesis and Lamarckian inheritance . Mendel's work was rediscovered in 1900 by the geneticist Hugo de Vries and others, soon confirmed that same year by experiments by William Bateson . Mendelian inheritance with segregating, particulate alleles came to be understood as the explanation for both discrete and continuously varying characteristics . </P>

Why is incomplete dominance not evidence for the blending theory of inheritance