Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings.
- Herbert Spencer Jennings
- Date:
- [1925]
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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![PROMETHEUS inherits it. It is not true that what an organism shall become is determined, foreordained, when he gets his supply of chemicals or genes in the germ cells, as the popular writers on eugenics would have us believe. The same set of genes may produce many different results, depending on the con¬ ditions under which it operates. True it is that there are limits to this ; that from one set of genes under a given en¬ vironment may come a result that no environment can produce from another set. But this is a matter of limitation, not of fixed and final determination ; it leaves open many alternative paths. And even the limitations lose their sharp definition when we contemplate the possibility of introducing other chemicals among those produced by the original genes. Every individual [48]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/B18032576_0051.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
