Summary Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and his colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he ?accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel? as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. (...) Moreover, in 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X 2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were ?too good to be true?, Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue. (shrink)

Heredity has been dismissed as an insignificant object in Claude Bernard’s physiology, and the topic is usually ignored by historians. Yet, thirty years ago, Jean Gayon demonstrated that Bernard did elaborate on the subject. The present paper aims at reassessing the issue of heredity in Claude Bernard’s project of a “general physiology”. My first claim is that Bernard’s interest in heredity was linked to his ambitious goal of redefining general physiology in relation to morphology. In 1867, not (...) only was morphology included within experimental physiology, but it also theoretically grounded physiological investigations. By 1878, morphology and physiology were considered as completely independent sciences, and only the latter was perceived as suitable to experimentation. My second claim is that this reversal reflected the existence of two opposite attitudes towards heredity. In the late 1860s, Bernard was convinced that heredity would soon be accessible to experimental manipulation and that new species would be produced in the laboratory exactly like organic chemistry succeeded to do for raw bodies. Ten years later, he ascertained that this was impossible. My third claim is that Bernard was epistemologically ill-equipped to address the issue of heredity. Bernard was strongly committed to a general reasoning scheme that acknowledged only three categories: determining conditions, constant laws and phenomena. This scheme was a key factor in his successes as a physiologist who was able to capture new mechanisms in living bodies. Nonetheless, it also prevented him from understanding how time and history could be endowed with a causal action that cannot be reduced to timeless parameters. (shrink)

Efforts to bring science into early 19th century breeding practices in Central Europe, organised from Brno, the Hapsburg city in which Mendel would later turn breeding experiments into a body of timeless theory, are here considered as a significant prelude to the great discovery. During those years prior to Mendel's arrival in Brno, enlightened breeders were seeking ways to regulate the process of heredity, which they viewed as a force to be controlled. Many were specialising in sheep breeding for (...) the benefit of the local wool industry while others were showing an interest in commercial plants, especially fruit trees and vines, and later cereals. Breeders explained their problems in regulating heredity in terms of climatic influences disruption due to crossing sports or saltations. Practical experience led them to the concepts of 'inheritance capacity' and the 'mutual elective affinity' of parents. The former was seen to differ among individuals and also among traits; the latter was proposed as a means of adding strength to heredity. The breeders came to recognise that traits might be hidden and yet transmitted as a 'potential' to future generations. They also grew to understand that heredity would be strengthened when a quality was 'fixed' within a lineage by 'pure blood relations.' Continued selection of the desired quality might then lead to 'a higher perfection.' But the ultimate 'physiological' question about breeding, 'what is inherited and how?,' found no answer. Major figures in this development included Abbot Napp, the one who asked this question and who was due to receive Mendel into the monastery in 1843, and Professor Diebl whose lectures on agriculture and natural science at the Brno Philosophical Institute Mendel would attend in 1846. Here we analyse their progress in theorizing about breeding up until about 1840. In discussing this development, we refer to certain international contacts, especially with respect to information transfer and scientific education, within the wider context of the late Enlightenment. (shrink)

In Black Panther, T'Challa and Erik "Killmonger" Stevens experience audiences with their departed fathers. Careful analysis of the second and especially the third Ancestral Plane visits downplays the metaphysical, leading toward a metaphor for better understanding one's place in the world. M'Baku fights gallantly, but T'Challa prevails, and bolsters his worthiness for the throne by sparing M'Baku's life. T'Challa rises from the ground, not in the entombed Hall of Kings, but in what appears to be an African savanna where (...) the sky is rippled in majestic blues and purples, giving off a twilight ambiance. Ingesting it increases one's strength, speed, agility, and stamina. It is akin to Captain America's super soldier serum, which reminds us of that awesome footrace between T'Challa and Steve in Avengers: Infinity War. The Heart Shaped Herb potion, then, helps T'Challa and Killmonger achieve greater focus on each man's past and allows a better perspective on who each one. (shrink)

define the hidden entities presumed to govern the process of hereditary transmissionWith that Hans-Jörg came to conceptualize, Carl Correns, its triple re-appreciation of Gregor Mendel’s work by the botanists Hugo de Vries, Erich Tschermak can be seen as the watershed after which theorizing about heredity & Pure Experimentation—Selecting.

Stress is one of the most powerful experiences to influence health and disease. Through epigenetic mechanisms, stress may generate a footprint that propagates to subsequent generations. Programming by prenatal stress or adverse experience in parents, grandparents, or earlier generations may thus be a critical determinant of lifetime health trajectories. Changes in regulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) by stress may enhance the vulnerability to certain pathogenic factors. This review explores the hypothesis that miRNAs represent stress‐responsive elements in epigenetic regulation that are potentially (...) heritable. Recent findings suggest that miRNAs are key players linking adverse early environments or ancestral stress with disease risk, thus they represent useful predictive disease biomarkers. Since miRNA signatures of disease are potentially heritable, big data management platforms will be vital to harness multi‐generational information and capture succinct yet potent biomarkers capable of directing preventative treatments. This feature would offer a unique window of opportunity to advance personalized medicine. (shrink)

Darwin's ideas on variation, heredity, and development differ significantly from twentieth-century views. First, Darwin held that environmental changes, acting either on the reproductive organs or the body, were necessary to generate variation. Second, heredity was a developmental, not a transmissional, process; variation was a change in the developmental process of change. An analysis of Darwin's elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks (1836-1844) to the last edition of the /Variation of Animals and Plants Under (...) Domestication/ (1875) complements previous Darwin scholarship on these issues. Included in this analysis is a description of the way Darwin employed the distinction between transmission and development, as well as the conceptual relationship he saw between heredity and variation. This paper is part of a larger project comparing commitments regarding variation during the latter half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This paper introduces a class of graphical independence models that is closed under marginalization and conditioning but that contains all DAG independence models. This class of graphs, called maximal ancestral graphs, has two attractive features: there is at most one edge between each pair of vertices; every missing edge corresponds to an independence relation. These features lead to a simple parameterization of the corresponding set of distributions in the Gaussian case.

This paper aims to give an impression of how biologists, at the turn of the twentieth century, came to conceptualize and define the hidden entities presumed to govern the process of hereditary transmission. With that, the stage was set for the emergence of genetics as a biological discipline that came to dominate the life sciences of the twentieth century. The annus mirabilis of 1900, with its triple re-appreciation of Gregor Mendel’s work by the botanists Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and (...) Erich Tschermak, can be seen as the watershed after which theorizing about heredity and experimentation—selecting pure lines and Mendelian crossing—became tightly connected. As to concepts before this, this paper will analyze Carl von Nägeli’s ‘idioplasm’, Hugo de Vries’s ‘pangenes’, and August Weismann’s ‘germ plasm’. Carl Correns’s Anlagen and Wilhelm Johannsen’s ‘genes’ would replace them in the decade after 1900.Keywords: Idioplasm ; Pangenes ; Germ plasm ; Anlagen ; Gene; Genotype. (shrink)

The notion that eukaryotes are ancestrally sexual has been gaining attention. This idea comes in part from the discovery of sets of “meiosis‐specific genes” in the genomes of protists. The existence of these genes has persuaded many that these organisms may be engaging in sex, even though this has gone undetected. The involvement of sex in protists is supported by the view that asexual reproduction results in the accumulation of mutations that would inevitably result in the decline and extinction of (...) such lineages. It is argued that this phenomenon can be obviated by polyploidy and that the “meiosis‐specific genes” are used in other processes, including polyploidy control and homologous recombination, independent of meiosis. These phenomena account for the finding that these genes are expressed in cultures devoid of apparent cell fusion events. Hence, it is also proposed that asexual, and not sexual, reproduction is the ancestral condition. (shrink)

Many efforts have been made in recent years to construct formal systems for mechanizing general mathematical reasoning. Most of these systems are based on logics which are stronger than first-order logic. However, there are good reasons to avoid using full second-order logic for this task. In this work we investigate a logic which is intermediate between FOL and SOL, and seems to be a particularly attractive alternative to both: ancestral logic. This is the logic which is obtained from FOL (...) by augmenting it with the transitive closure operator. While the study of this logic has so far been mostly model-theoretical, this work is devoted to its proof theory. Two natural Gentzen-style proof systems for ancestral logic are presented: one for the reflexive transitive closure, and one for the non-reflexive one. We show that these systems are sound for ancestral logic and provide evidence that they indeed encompass all forms of reasoning for this logic that are used in practice. The two systems are shown to be equivalent by providing translation algorithms between them. We end with an investigation of two main proof-theoretical properties: cut elimination and constructive consistency proof. (shrink)

Famously, in his seminal After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux charges Heidegger with what he classifies as strong correlationism. In general,...

Human infants are born ready to respond to affiliative signals of a caretaker's face, body, and voice. This ritualized behavior in ancestral mothers and infants was an adaptation that gave rise to music and dance as exaptations for promoting group ritual and other social bonding behaviors, arguing for an evolutionary relationship between mother and infant bonding and both music and dance.

This study explores the principles of meritocracy and heredity as formulated in the three works of early Daoist philosophy, the Laozi, Zhuangzi and Wenzi. Because Daoist philosophy emerged in critical response to the Confucian worldview, this investigation is placed against the backdrop of pertinent Confucian propositions. To this end, the study begins with a review of Confucian positions on the issue of meritocracy and heredity as expressed in the main transmitted works, as well as newly excavated texts that (...) can be associated with this intellectual tradition. The paper concludes that, while indeed rejecting the Confucian understanding of meritocracy, Daoist texts operated with their own concepts on human excellency. Moreover, the opposition between meritocracy and heredity characteristic of some Confucian works appears less pronounced in early Daoist philosophy. (shrink)

Historians have emphasized the appearance of a productive research program in genetics after 1910, and philosophers and biologists have considered endorsement of genetics as a progressive move, indeed as a starting point for modern experimental biology. These efforts focus on what biology had changed to. This paper examines the condition from which biology moved, stressing the way in which Americans held heredity and development as a natural, intimately intertwined couple. Heredity accounts for likenesses, development for variation, and the (...) two act together throughout an individual's life. This discussion establishes the antecedent conditions necessary to explain the split of genetics and embryology and addresses the reasons for the split. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Relation of Genotype to Phenotype Statistical Approaches to the Study of Quantitative Characters Problems Raised by Statistical Methodologies Making Quantitative Trait Genes Real Bibliography.

This commentary acknowledges the importance of Davey's biocognitive approach to the uneven distribution of fears on the basis of its contribution to a human model for understanding fear. An integrated heredity-environment and developmental transactional approach based on field/system theory is recommended in place of the mechanistic heredity × environment interactionism that Davey uses to explain behavioral ontogeny.

Various thinkers are concerned that the Orthodox view of Ancestral Sin does not avoid the age-old Augustinian concern of Pelagianism. After all, the doctrine of Ancestral Sin maintains that fallen human beings do not necessarily or inevitably commit actual sins. In contemporary literature, this claim could be articulated as a denial of the ‘inevitability thesis.’ A denial of the inevitability thesis, so contemporary thinkers maintain, seems to imply both that human beings can place themselves in right relation to (...) God as well as the Pelagian denial that all require Christ's work to attain this right relation to God. This article demonstrates that the Ancestral Sin, along with a denial of the inevitability thesis, is neither Pelagian nor Semi-Pelagian. I show that the doctrine of Ancestral Sin denies (Semi-) Pelagianism in various ways. I show that, for Ancestral Sin to entail (Semi-) Pelagianism, one must commit to several assumptions, each of which is plausibly deniable and none of which Orthodox thinkers affirm. (shrink)

The so-called “Baldwin Effect” has been studied for years in the fields of Artificial Life, Cognitive Science, and Evolutionary Theory across disciplines. This idea is often conflated with genetic assimilation, and has raised controversy in trans-disciplinary scientific discourse due to the many interpretations it has. This paper revisits the “Baldwin Effect” in Baldwin’s original spirit from a joint historical, theoretical and experimental approach. Social Heredity – the inheritance of cultural knowledge via non-genetic means in Baldwin’s term – is also (...) taken into consideration. I shall argue that the Baldwin Effect can occur via social heredity without necessity for genetic assimilation. Computational experiments are carried out to show that when social heredity is permitted with high fidelity, there is no need for the assimilation of acquired characteristics; instead the Baldwin Effect occurs as promoting more plasticity to facilitate future intelligence. The role of mind and intelligence in evolution and its implications in an extended synthesis of evolution are briefly discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that the desire for a thin female physique and its pathological expression in eating disorders result from a social pressure for thinness. However, such widespread behavior may be better understood not merely as the result of arbitrary social pressure, but as an exaggerated expression of behavior that may have once been adaptive. The reproductive suppression hypothesis suggests that natural selection shaped a mechanism for adjusting female reproduction to socioecological conditions by altering the amount of body fat. (...) In modern Western culture, social and ecological cues, which would have signaled the need for temporary postponement of reproduction in ancestral environments, may now be experienced to an unprecedented intensity and duration. (shrink)

On the classical account of evolution by natural selection found in Lewontin and many subsequent authors, ENS is conceived as involving three key ingredients: phenotypic variation, fitness differences, and heredity. Through the analysis of three problem cases involving heredity, I argue that the classical conception is substantially flawed, showing that heredity is not required for selection. I consider further problems with the classical account of ENS arising from conflations between three distinct senses of the central concept of (...) ‘fitness’ and offer an alternative to the classical conception of ENS involving the interaction of distinct evolutionary mechanisms. (shrink)

This article examines Oyowe’s highly distinctive socio-ontological account of ancestral existence. According to Oyowe, ancestors are intentional objects. Ancestors thus constitute a social kind and are ontologically distinct from natural kinds. The article critiques and rejects Oyowe’s distinction between social and natural kinds. The article then goes on to outline a possible alternative approach that draws on quasi-materialist and pan-psychic metaphysics to argue that ancestors exist as a natural kind—more specifically, ancestral existence consists in the this-worldly survival of (...) the mentalistic aspects of a human person’s biological death. Throughout, the article is concerned with the rationality of belief in ancestral existence rather than with their de facto existence as such. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1938, is based on the Muirhead Lectures given at Birmingham University in February and March of 1937. The first half of this book is mainly devoted to an exposition of the principles of genetics, whilst the second half deals with more controversial topics, with the text providing an insight into the ideology of the time. This title will be of interest to students of politics and history.

After presenting the ordinary and the Fregean formulations of the ancestral, I raise the question of what is their relationship, the natural candidate being that the Fregean version is an analysans intended to improve upon, and replace, the common notion of ancestral (the analysandum). Next, two types of circles that arise in connection with the Fregean ancestral are presented, and it is claimed that one of the circles makes it impossible to maintain the just described (“replacement”) interpretation. (...) A reference is made to Kerry, who was the first to point out a circularity in Frege’s ancestral. Some of Frege’s remarks are examined in order to tentatively sketch, an answer to the issue of the relationship between ordinary and Fregean ancestral; the latter, if not as an analysans replacing the common notion, can still be seen as a profound enrichment of the former. (shrink)

The most challenging objections to the Threat Simulation Theory (TST) of the function of dreaming include such issues as whether the competing Random Activation Theory can explain dreaming, whether TST can accommodate the apparently dysfunctional nature of post-traumatic nightmares, whether dreams are too bizarre and disorganized to constitute proper simulations, and whether dream recall is too biased to reveal the true nature of dreams. I show how these and many other objections can be accommodated by TST, and how several lines (...) of new supporting evidence are provided by the commentators. Accordingly TST offers a promising new approach to the function of dreaming, covering a wide range of evidence and theoretically integrating psychological and biological levels of explanation. (shrink)