The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    worker that through such treatment can be de- veloped into queens. There are also in the normal hive other eggs, produced parthenogenetically, which will develop into male or drone bees, and which can by no possibilities of altered nutrition be transformed into workers or queens, any more than the worker eggs could be made to develop into drones. But this illustration, after all, serves only to give recognition to the fundamental fact that heredity, in the last analysis, puts certain definite limitations on environmental interference. No conceivable environing conditions can be expected, in the nature of the case, to bring out potentialities that do not exist. A dwarfed Monte- rey pine may be transformed through altered nur- ture into a mammoth pine; a dwarfed rhubarb into a giant rhubarb; a worker bee into a queen bee. But no conceivable modification of nurture could transform the Monterey pine into a rhubarb of any sort, or the rhubarb into a pine, or either pine or rhubarb into a bee. To suggest such transformation would be grotesque. Yet these extreme cases are perhaps worth citing to emphasize the fact that when we speak of the power of nurture over nature—as applied to any given individual—we refer only to a power of selection between divergent hereditary [10]
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