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.

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    BIOLOGICAL BACKGROUND • predict what kind of offspring will be produced by a given pair of parents— save in a few respects, in cases where the constitution of both packets of a par¬ ticular pair are known for each parent. If both parents have the corresponding pairs defective in the same manner— lacking, for example, something re¬ quired for producing a normal mind —then their children will be all defective like the parents ; feeble-minded parents wiU produce feeble-minded children. But if, as may well be the case, the feeble mind is due to defects in different packets in the two parents, then all experimental breeding shows that the two parental stocks may supplement one another, so that the defect will not appear in the offspring. The character¬ istics that are predictable are extremely few ; a new combination is produced [35]