Mendelian nomenclature of symbolic representation of genes and their alleles makes it readily amenable to algebraic presentation of population events. Mendel himself was the first to take notice of this when he explained Gärtner's and Kölreuter's observations “that hybrids have a tendency to revert to parental forms” in algebraic terms:

In the last line of the tabulation Mendel generalized the results for the nth generation of selfing that follows mono-hybridization: the ratio of “A : Aa : a” would be 2n−1 : 2 : 2n−1.

Bateson adopted Mendel's hypothesis upon reading de Vries's paper because he believed that it was consistent with his notion of evolution by discontinuous steps. This placed him in opposition to the claim of the mathematical statistician Karl Pearson in favor of Galton's “Law of Ancestral Heredity” of continuous Darwinian evolution (Provine, 1971; and see Chapter 3). In a discussion following a talk by Bateson's colleague Punnett, it was suggested that “a dominant allele, once introduced into a population, would increase in frequency until reaching stability at 0.5, given the usual phenotypic ratio 3 dominant: 1 recessive thereafter” (Provine, 1971, 133–134).