Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings.

  • Herbert Spencer Jennings
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/112 (page 30)
    PROMETHEUS inheritance of a characteristic in a given stock, we cannot be certain that this same characteristic will be inherited in that way in another stock. It all depends on which particular one or more of the hundreds of genes on which the character depends is diverse in the two parents. It is a commonly-received dogma that if the two parents are defective in the same hereditary characteristic, aU the offspring will have this defect. But this need not occur. It wiU be true only if the defective characteristic is due to a peculiarity of the same gene in the two parents. Where it is due to defects in different genes in the two parents, then the latter supplement each other, and none of the offspring have the defective feature ; such a situation may be readily brought about in animals. Heredity is not the [32]