The foundations of genetics / by F.A.E. Crew.

  • Francis Crew
Date:
1966
Catalogue details

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

Credit: The foundations of genetics / by F.A.E. Crew. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    186/234 (page 156)
    156 THE FOUNDATIONS OF GENETICS inheritance of cataract and of colour-blindness. In 1907 Davenport, head of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor in the United States, described the mode of inheritance of eye-colour in man and Nettleship, in England, reported upon the transmission of congenital stationary night-blindness. In 1908 there was an outpouring of new knowledge concerning human heredity, both in Britain and in America (see the bibliography in Bateson's MendeVs Principles of Heredity) and it became abundantly clear that the same laws of organic inheritance applied to man as to other organisms. Since that time human genetics has developed with ever-increasing speed as the usefulness of such knowledge gained appreciation in anthropological, educational, medical and sociological circles. Because gross defects and derangements are far more easily recog¬ nized and traced than is normality, and because they are of interest to medicine, they have been extensively studied. It was from such studies that the discipline of medical (clinical) genetics developed. From studies of the incidence of such abnormal characters in a population and of the frequency of the genes that correspond to them came the need for the development of (human) population genetics with its novel and sophisticated statistical techniques. Variations in respect of such qualities as intelligence, body-build and stature, instances of continuous variation, being of interest to the anthropologist, the educationist and the medical man alike, have been the subjects of much investigation during which new bio- metrical techniques were devised to add to the development of biometrical genetics. Human genetics, as this developed, inevitably led to a reconsideration of the aims of eugenics. Though man and other animal types have much in common, he is unique. He, like the rest, is the product of the evolutionary process, of natural selection—the differential reproduction of bio¬ logically advantageous combinations of mutant genes leading to the persistence, improvement and multiplication of dominant types, each of these achieving a highly successful level of organization. Thus came into being biological man. But his evolution did not end at this point. He developed mechanisms for the transmission of