Mendel discovered three laws of inheritance through experiments breeding pea plants:
1) The Law of Segregation states that alleles for a gene separate during gamete formation such that each gamete carries one allele.
2) The Law of Dominance describes how some alleles are dominant and others recessive, with dominant alleles determining the phenotype.
3) The Law of Independent Assortment explains that genes assort independently of one another during gamete formation, resulting in a 9:3:3:1 phenotypic ratio for two gene traits.