The Methods and Scope of Genetics: An inaugural lecture delivered 23 October 1908Bateson, William
Science
The Methods and Scope of Genetics: An inaugural lecture delivered 23 October 1908
Bateson, William
Genetics; Heredity
We have got to the point of view from which we see the individual made
up of a large number of distinct ingredients, contributed from two
sources, and in respect of any of them he may have received two similar
portions or two dissimilar portions. We shall not go far wrong if we
extend and elaborate our illustration thus. Let us imagine the contents
of a gamete as a fluid made by taking a drop from each of a definite
number of bottles in a chest, containing tinctures of the several
ingredients. There is one such chest from which the male gamete is to be
made up, and a similar chest containing a corresponding set of bottles
out of which the components of the female gamete are to be taken. But in
either chest one or more of the bottles may be empty; then nothing goes
in to represent that ingredient from that chest, and if corresponding
bottles are empty in both chests, then the individual made on
fertilisation by mixing the two collections of drops together does not
contain the missing ingredient at all. It follows therefore that an
individual may thus be "pure-bred," namely alike on both sides of his
composition as regards each ingredient in one of two ways, either by
having received the ingredient from the male chest and from the female,
or in having received it from neither. Conversely in respect of any
ingredient he may be "cross-bred," receiving the presence of it from one
gamete and the absence of it from the other.
The second conception with which we have now to become thoroughly
familiar is that of the individual as composed of what we call presences
and absences of all the possible ingredients. It is the basis of all
progress in genetic analysis. Let me give you two illustrations. A blue
eye is due to the absence of a factor which forms pigment on the front
of the iris. Two blue-eyed parents therefore, as Hurst has proved, do
not have dark-eyed children. The dark eye is due to either a single or
double dose of the factor missing from the blue eye. So dark-eyed
persons may have families all dark-eyed, or families composed of a
mixture of dark and light-eyed children in certain proportions which on
the average are definite.
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