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"It's bred in the bone a clear case of Mendelism," he murmured softly, because he had just remembered how Colonel Curtis, before ever the war was ended and its bitterness assuaged, had decided a Southern girl's conflict between love and duty by galloping fifty miles across Confederate South Carolina and carrying off the lady. Grandfather and grandson alike were men of action.
Further, although Mendelism in itself shows no evidence of the origin of the characters, it assumes that they arose as complete units, and one suggestion is that a dominant factor might at some of the divisions in gametegenesis pass entirely into one daughter cell, and therefore be absent from the other, and thus individuals might be developed in which a dominant character was absent.
Here there are differences of habit, and slight but constant differences of structure; but it is impossible to find any relation between the former and the latter. Mendelism in itself affords no evidence of the origin of new characters, since it deals only with the heredity of the characters which it finds usually in the varieties of cultivated animals and plants.
According to Mendelism the structure and development of each part of the soma is due to the constitution of the chromosomes of the nuclei in that part. The effects of castration show that the development of certain characters is greatly influenced in some way by the presence of the testes in a distant part of the body.
Now this may be historically true of the Sweet Pea, but I would point out that once the dogma of the permanent indivisible unit or factor is abandoned, there is nothing in Mendelism inconsistent with the possibility of the gradual increase or decrease of a character in evolution.
The publication of this Report merely hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents.
We may not be so sure that there is not some evidence for "growing beards," "developing bass voices," and "manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose femininity has worn thin.
In conclusion it may be remarked that biologists do not claim to have solved all the problems connected with heredity and variation. But the general results taught us by Mendelism are now established beyond controversy.
The English school has leaned backward in its devotion to the inductive method of accumulating inheritance data, ostensibly without prejudice for or against any particular theory but in reality with an ill-concealed bias against anything savoring of "Mendelism."
Mendelism provides no place for any such transmission. Mendel's Law is sometimes called the law of alternative inheritance, thus embodying in its name the thought that offspring may show the characters possessed by one parent or by the other, but that it cannot develop any characters whatever which were not manifest or latent in the ancestry.
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