![]() ![]() Heredity was the “missing science,” the ever prescient H.G. Before he was done, Weismann had severed 901 tails through five generations of mice. Would their offspring have tails or not? To us it seems obvious, but no one knew for sure. In 1883, the German biologist August Weismann cut off the tails of seven female and five male white mice. When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” in 1859, he was uncomfortably aware that his entire theory of evolution rested atop a foundation that could not be seen. (We still speak of bloodlines and blood relatives.) Aristotle said, rightly, that creatures must pass along not just material, like wood for a carpenter, but a message: “the shape and the form.”ĭuring the next two millenniums, little more was learned. ![]() ![]() Two hundred years later, Aristotle, observing that some Greeks resembled their mothers and grandmothers, proposed that women as well as men carry their likeness, in the blood. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras theorized that male semen conveyed the information into female bodies, which provided nourishment. $32.Įven before the beginning of human history, people recognized that parents transmit something - call it “likeness” - to their children, and the children to their children, and so on down the generations. THE GENE An Intimate History By Siddhartha Mukherjee 592 pp. ![]()
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