Article ID: CBB211130319

Darbishire expands his vision of heredity from Mendelian genetics to inherited memory (2015)

unapi

The British biologist A.D. Darbishire (1879–1915) responded to the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel's theory of heredity by testing it experimentally, first in Oxford, then in Manchester and London. He summarised his conclusions in a textbook ‘Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery' (1911), in which he questioned whether Mendelism alone could explain all aspects of practical breeding experience. Already he had begun to think about an alternative theory to give greater emphasis to the widely held conviction among breeders regarding the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's life. Redefining heredity in terms of a germ-plasm based biological memory, he used vocabulary drawn partly from sources outside conventional science, including the metaphysical/vitalistic writings of Samuel Butler and Henri Bergson. An evolving hereditary memory fitted well with the conception of breeding as a creative art aimed at greater economic efficiency. For evolution beyond human control he proposed a self-modifying process, claiming it to surpass in efficiency the chancy mechanism of natural selection proposed by Darwin. From his writings, including early chapters of an unfinished book entitled ‘An Introduction to a Biology’, we consider how he reached these concepts and how they relate to later advances in understanding the genome and the genetic programme.

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Authors & Contributors
Radick, Gregory
Simunek, Michal
Ankeny, Rachel A.
Berry, Dominic
Breidbach, Olaf
Charnley, Berris
Journals
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Journal of the History of Biology
Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
Publishers
Centre for Sciences and Humanities of the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Yale University
Cambridge University Press
Concepts
Mendelism; Mendelian inheritance
Heredity
Genetics
Breeding
Plant genetics
Biology
People
Bateson, William
Galton, Francis
Tschermak-Seysenegg, Erich von
Pearson, Karl
Weldon, Walter Frank Raphael
Correns, Carl Erich
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, late
Places
Great Britain
United States
Germany
Japan
Central Europe
Sweden
Institutions
Cambridge University
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