Genetic Principles by Mendel

2012 Words9 Pages
ANTHROPOLOGY Genetic Principles by Mendel Prachi Bhutada Genetic Principles by Mendel For thousands of years farmers and herders have been selectively breeding their plants and animals to produce more useful hybrids. It was a hit or miss process as the actual mechanisms governing inheritance were unknown. People had long noticed the similarity between the parents and the progeny. For example, human beings have blond, or red, or brown, or black hair. They may have one of several different types of blood, one or several colours of skin. A child may have the same eye colour as his mother. A lot of theories were proposed trying to explain these similarities. Hippocrates and Aristotle proposed the idea of what they called pangenes, which they thought were tiny pieces of body parts. They thought that pangenes came together to make up the homunculus, a tiny pre-formed human that people thought grew into a baby. There was another theory called the blending theory which proposed that offspring of two parents "blend" the traits of both parents. For example, if one of the parent has dark skin and another parent has fair skin colour, the child's skin will be a intermediate shade of the two colours. It was noticed that this theory did not prove to be true in all cases. Also, if this held true, then eventually all organisms would become more alike in each generation. Charles Darwin’s pangenesis: The pangenesis theory, adopted and adapted from Hippocrates's theory, implies that the whole of parental organisms contribute to heredity. Darwin emphasized that only cells could regenerate new tissues or generate new organisms. He said that atomic sized gemmules formed by cells would diffuse and collect in the reproductive organs. These gemmules, that could be transmitted from parent to offspring were the reason behind the inherited characteristics in the next

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