The behaviour of homologous twinning in heredity has been little
studied. It does not exist as a normal feature in any animal which
is amenable to experiment, and we cannot positively assert that a
comparable phenomenon exists in plants; for in them--the Orange, for
example--polyembryony may evidently be produced by a parthenogenetic
development of nucellar tissue. It is possible that in Man twinning
is due to a peculiarity of the mother, not of the father. It may and
not rarely does descend from mother to daughter, but whether it can be
passed on through a male generation to a daughter again, there is not
sufficient evidence to show. The facts as far as they go are consistent
with the inference which may be drawn from Loeb's experiment, that the
twinning of a fertilized ovum may be determined not by the germ-cells
which united to form it, but by the environment in which it begins to
develop. The opinion that twinning may descend through the male directly
has been lately expressed by Dr. J. Oliver in the _Eugenics Review_
(1912), on the evidence of cases in which twins had occurred among the
relations of fathers of twins, but I do not know of any comprehensive
collection of evidence bearing on the subject.
Besides twinning of the whole body a comparable duplicity of various
parts of the same body may occur. Such divisions affect especially those
organs which have an axis of bilateral symmetry, such as the thumb, a
cotyledon, a median petal, the frond of a fern or the anal fin of a
fish. From the little yet known it is clear that the genetic analysis
of these conditions must be very difficult, but evidence of any kind
regarding them will be valuable. We want especially to know whether
these divisions are due to the _addition_ of some factor or power which
enables the part to divide, or whether the division results from the
_absence_ of something which in the normal body prevents the part from
dividing. Breeding experiments, so far as they go, suggest that the less
divided state is usually dominant to the more divided.[9] The two-celled
Tomato fruit is dominant to the many-celled type. The Manx Cat's tail,
with its suppression of caudal segmentation is a partial dominant over
the normal tail. The tail of the Fowl in what is called the "Rumpless"
condition is at least superficially comparable with that of the Manx
Cat, and though the evidence is not wholly consistent, Davenport
obtained facts indicating that this suppressed condition of the caudal
vertebrae is an imperfect dominant.[10]
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