Heredity and Variation

The language of gene interaction.

The study of variation and heredity, in our ignorance of the causation of those phenomena, must be built of statistical data, as Mendel knew long ago; but, as he also perceived, the ground must be prepared by specific experiment. The phenomena of heredity and variation are specific questions. That is where our exact science will begin. Otherwise we may one day see those huge foundations of “bio...

The National Merit Twin Studyl

This chapter will be concerned with some of the methodological problems and some early results of the National Merit Twin Study which is still in progress and when finished will be reported in detail elsewhere. Analyses completed so far have been primarily concerned with the relative effects of heredity and environment on ability measures, which will therefore be the major focus of this chapter...

William Bateson (1861-1926)

At the turn of the twentieth century, William Bateson [3] studied organismal variation and heredity of traits within the framework of evolutionary theory in England. Bateson applied Gregor Mendel's work to Charles Darwin [4]'s theory of evolution [5] and coined the term genetics for a new biological discipline. By studying variation and advocating Mendelian genetics, Bateson furthered the field...

Sir William Lawrence (1783-1867); a study of pre-Darwinian ideas on heredity and variation.

Adaptation from leaps in the dark.

Although many adaptations occur by selection of beneficial alleles transformed from neutral or deleterious standing variation, new identical mutant alleles that arise as premeiotic clusters have an increased probability of fixation that can rise to the levels that are similar to the fixation of standing variation. Hence, the evidence is still out on the proportion of adaptations that use preexi...