Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment states that "when two or more characteristics are inherited, individual hereditary factors assort independently during gamete production, giving different traits an equal opportunity of occurring together."

When two or more different genes are located to close to each other in a chromosome are said to be linked. Linked gene are found to avoid recombination and are not assorted during gamete production.

Linked genes are in contradiction to the Law of independent assortment thus, if Mendel had known about linkage during his experiments, he would have not been able to explain the inheritance of two genes without one affecting the other.