A splice of evolution?

It is famously noted that when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species he had no plausible theory of inheritance to drive his hypothesis. Specifically, one of the major issues of the "blending" model whereby the phenotypes of the parents average out in the subsequent generation is that such mixing eliminates the variation which is a necessary precondition for natural selection. At the same time that Darwin was revolutionizing our conceptualization of how the tree of life came to be, Gregor Mendel was preforming the experiments which solidified his eponymous theory of inheritance. Though ignored in his own day by ~1900 Mendelism reemerged and offered a relatively parsimonious abstraction which could explain why variation was not eliminated through the fusion of sexual reproduction. The discrete genes themselves were simply rearranged every generation in a digital manner, a genotype was translated into a phenotype, rather than the more analog model of ...