Mendelism: Third EditionPunnett, Reginald Crundall
Science
Mendelism: Third Edition
Punnett, Reginald Crundall
Mendel's law
The interpretation of this case turns upon the constitution of the Brown
Leghorn hen, upon her heterozygous condition with regard to the two factors
F and I, and upon the repulsion that occurs between them when the gametes
are formed. Through an independent set of experiments this view of the
nature of the Brown Leghorn hen has been confirmed in an interesting way.
There are fowls which possess neither the factor for pigment nor the
inhibitory factor, which are in constitution ppii. Such birds when crossed
with the Silky give dark pigmented birds of both sexes in F_1, and the F_2
generation consists of pigmented and unpigmented in the ratio 3 : 1. Now a
cock of such a strain crossed with a Brown Leghorn hen should give only
completely unpigmented birds. But if, as we have supposed, the Brown
Leghorn hen is producing gametes Fpi and fpI, the male birds produced by
such a cross should be heterozygous for I, {112} _i.e._ in constitution
ffppIi, while the hen birds, though identical in appearance so far as
absence of pigmentation goes, should not contain this factor but should be
constitutionally Ffppii. Crossed with the pure Silky, the F_1 birds of
opposite sexes should give an entirely different result. For while the hens
should give only deeply pigmented birds of both sexes, the cocks should
give equal numbers of deeply pigmented and slightly pigmented birds (cf.
Fig. 25). These were the results which the experiment actually gave, thus
affording strong confirmation of the view which we have been led to take of
the Brown Leghorn hen. Essentially the poultry case is that of the currant
moth. It differs in that the factor which {113} repels femaleness produces
no visible effect, and its presence or absence can only be determined by
the introduction of a third factor, that for pigmentation.
This conception of the nature of the Brown Leghorn hen leads to a curious
paradox. We have stated that the Silky cock transmits the pigmented
condition, but transmits it to his daughters only. Apparently the case is
one of unequal transmission by the father. Actually, as our analysis has
shown, it is one of unequal transmission by the mother, the father's
contribution to the offspring being identical for each sex. The mother
transmits to the daughters her dominant quality of femaleness, but to
balance this, as it were, she transmits to her sons another quality which
her daughters do not receive. It is a matter of common experience among
human families that in respect to particular qualities the sons tend to
resemble their mothers more than the daughters do, and it is not improbable
that such observations have a real foundation for which the clue may be
provided by the Brown Leghorn hen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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