Abstract
THE experimental results reported recently by Prof. C. H. Waddington1 seem to make explicit in an important way what some zoologists, not professional geneticists, may have felt for long as something unsatisfying in many of the translations of evolutionary problems into Mendelian terms with which we are all familiar. He has reminded us once more that artificial selection, and so by presumption natural selection, acts upon animals having qualities, such as crossveinlessness, and not upon genes. He has shown that there are more genetic ways than one of being a crossveinless fruit-fly, and that, if crossveinlessness is selected for, then crossveinlessness will become established in a relation to the underlying genetic structure about which it is not clear that anything can in principle be predicted.
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References
Waddington, Nature, 169, 278 (1952).
Harland, Proc. Seventh International Genetic Conference (1939).
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'ESPINASSE, P. Selection of the Genetic Basis for an Acquired Character. Nature 170, 71 (1952). https://doi.org/10.1038/170071a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/170071a0
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