The facts of life / C.D. Darlington.

  • C. D. Darlington
Date:
1953
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The facts of life / C.D. Darlington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    young, as for example, vultures and apes. . . . Aristotle maintains in the second book on Vegetation that the fruits of the female palms mature from an odour coming from the male trees. These ancient beliefs, these fairy tales, as recorded in the writings of famous men and their modem successors are impor¬ tant. They show us both what men throughout the ages have been willing to believe and also, to a certain extent, why they believed it. They show us also the strange tapestry of truth and superstition which had been handed down to our forebears at the time they were beginning the scientific revolution. The problems of heredity are difficult enough as they are presented to us by nature. As they are presented to us by the masters of ancient thought they are much more difficult. Their labours had cleared a little ground at the expense of barring every way out from the clearing. They had made themselves a cage. To us it seems obvious that plants are often fertilized with the help of the wind but that animals are not. To them the contradiction was fatal. To us it seems obvious that the moral value of original sin has no bearing on the physiological evidence for the inheritance of disease. To them the moral and the physiological problems were the same: what should happen, would happen. To us it seems obvious that the mule is half-way between the horse and the ass, whichever is the father, and that the contributions of the male and the female to heredity must therefore be the same. To them the difference between the work done by the two sexes in reproduction was so great it was impossible to think that the work done in heredity was the same. It was possible for a shrewd sceptic, like the French-Jewish philosopher Montaigne, to see and express the problem of heredity quite clearly. The organic connection with his father, the material out of which he was built, was a mere drop of water. This structureless fluid conveyed to Montaigne his father's propensity to stone in the bladder. But not to his elder brothers. His father's propensity was not expressed until twenty-five years after Montaigne was born. And Montaigne 30