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Well, Darwin's idea of pangenesis is basically blending inheritance--like mixing two different paint colors to get an intermediate mix. Blending inheritance does seem to explain why the mating of a short parent and a tall parent produces offspring that are mostly intermediate in height.

But Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity (unknown to Darwin, although Mendel knew of Darwin's work) contradict this intuitive scheme. The solution to this puzzle arrived in 1917 with the idea that many traits like height and skin color are the result of many different genes of small effect acting independently to produce the outcome we see, whether it's skin color or height or intelligence or whatever

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