Genetics, medicine, and man / H. J. Muller, C. C. Little , Laurence H. Snyder.

  • Muller, H. J. (Hermann Joseph), 1890-1967.
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Genetics, medicine, and man / H. J. Muller, C. C. Little , Laurence H. Snyder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/182 (page 2)
    GENETICS, MEDICINE, AND MAN things can be understood as having arisen gradually, through a long succession of steps no one of which required a preview of the adaptive end but only a mechanism for blind hereditary vari¬ ations, sorted out by the automatic sieve of natural selection. In this light even the living world itself, in all its manifestations, be¬ came a special sort of derivative of basically inanimate forces of nature. Lucretius and some still more ancient writers of non- Aristotelian views had indeed believed this already, but their structure of things had been far too sketchy and imperfect to carry conviction then against the weight of animistic tradition, especially as they lacked the necessary evidence which modern science has brought forward. Though the crux of Darwin's interpretation, and therefore of the whole scientific view of things, lay in the existence of vari¬ ations that are not primarily directed towards an adaptive end, and in their effective inheritance by later generations, there was but the most insufficient knowledge of just these processes of variation and heredity available to Darwin and his colleagues, as they them¬ selves realized. Neither could they have even a provisional inter¬ pretation of how these processes in their turn might be based in physicochemical phenomena. It has been the role of genetics, a science unknown to them, to fill in, in considerable measure, these glaring gaps, and thus to forge the central links in the chain of evidence that now binds together our conceptions of inanimate and animate nature into one unified though as yet far from com¬ pleted whole. So involved has been the historical development of genetics that it would hardly be feasible in these two chapters to attempt a recital of the succession of its theories, mistakes, and discoveries, and at the same time to give a coherent outline of the modern genetic view of things. As it was the latter task which was assigned, the pardon of the reader must be asked for our adopting the es¬ sentially unscientific course of speaking ex cathedra, and presenting only a sort of digest of some of the important elementary results of this mass of work, while usually avoiding mention of the specific details, steps of proof, and personalities concerned. 2