Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems: Authorised TranslationWeismann, August
Science
Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems: Authorised Translation
Weismann, August
Evolution (Biology); Genetics; Reproduction
If it could be shown that a purely parthenogenetic species had become
transformed into a new one, such an observation would prove the
existence of some force of transformation other than selective
processes, for the new species could not have been produced by these
latter. As already explained, the only selection which would be
possible for such a species, would lead to the survival of one group of
individuals and to the extinction of all others. Thus in our example
that group of individuals would alone survive, the ancestors of which
originally possessed the appropriate colour. But if one group alone
survived, it follows that all hereditary individual differences would
have disappeared from the species, for the members of such a single
group are identical with one another and with their original ancestors.
We thus reach the conclusion that monogonic reproduction can never
cause hereditary individual variability, but that, on the other hand,
it is very likely to lead to its entire suppression.
But the case is very different with sexual reproduction. When once
individual differences have begun to appear in a species propagated by
this process, uniformity among its individuals can never again be
reached. So far from this being the case, the differences must even be
increased in the course of generations, not indeed in intensity, but in
number, for new combinations of the individual characters will
continually arise.
Again, assuming the existence of a number of individuals which differ
from one another by a few hereditary individual characters, it follows
that no individual of the second generation can be identical with any
other. They must all differ, not only actually but also potentially,
for their differences exist at the very beginning of development, and
do not solely depend upon the accidental conditions under which they
live. Moreover, no one of the descendants can be identical with any of
the ancestors, for each of the former unites within itself the
hereditary tendencies of two parents, and its organism is therefore, as
it were, a compromise between two developmental tendencies. Similarly
in the third generation, the hereditary tendencies of two individuals
of the second generation enter into combination. But since the
germ-plasm of the latter is not simple, but composed of two
individually distinct kinds of germ-plasm, it follows that an
individual of the third generation is a compromise between four
different hereditary tendencies. In the fourth generation, eight; in
the fifth, sixteen; in the sixth, thirty-two different hereditary
tendencies must come together, and each of them will make itself more
or less felt in some part of the future organism. Thus by the sixth
generation a large number of varied combinations of ancestral
individual characters will appear, combinations which have never
existed before and which can never exist again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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