Sunday, August 10, 2014

My Year of Darwin: 8/10/2014 Darwin's puzzles: answers college freshmen now know

 Charles Darwin


"The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child often reverts in certain characteristics to its grandfather or grandmother or other more more remote ancestor; why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. " Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Hopefully, the reader (if there are any) will have words like "recessive" and "sex-linked" pop into their heads. These were terms that would come a few decades later, although Mendel was working on them soon after Origin was published. 

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