Chip Off the Old Block: Generation, Development, and Ancestral Concepts of Heredity

Abstract

Heredity is such a fundamental concept that it is hard to imagine a world where the connection between parents and offspring is not understood. Three hundred years ago thinking of the phenomenon of heredity bore on a cluster of distinct philosophical questions inherited from antiquity concerning the nature and origin of substances or beings that lacked biological meaning. We are reminded of this philosophical heritage by the fact that in the 18th century the study of reproduction, embryology and development was referred to as “the science of generation”. It is now clear that reproduction, the biological process by which parents produce offspring, is a fundamental feature of all life on Earth. Heredity, the transmission of traits from parents to offspring via sexual or asexual reproduction, allows differences between individuals to accumulate and evolve through natural selection. Genetics is the study of heredity, and in particular, variation of fundamental units responsible for heredity. Ideas underlying this theory evolved in considerably different and unrelated ways across a number of knowledge domains, including philosophy, medicine, natural history, and breeding. The fusion of these different domains into a single comprehensive theory in 19th century biology was a historically and culturally interdependent process, thus examining genetic prehistory should unravel these entanglements. The major goal of our review is tracing the various threads of thought that gradually converged into our contemporary understanding of heredity.

Transfer of membrane(s) matter(s)—non-genetic inheritance of (metabolic) phenotypes?

“…We do not intend to present an–even short–outline of the cultural history of the thinking on biological inheritance in various political and societal systems over the centuries. This interesting topic has been addressed in depth by several very important and fascinating articles and books ( Rheinberger and Müller-Wille, 2009 ; Szabo and Poczai, 2019 ; Poczai and Santiago-Blay, 2022 ). Nevertheless, some introductory remarks are presented, just to prepare the following considerations.…”

Themes of Biological Inheritance in Early Nineteenth Century Sheep Breeding as Revealed by J. M. Ehrenfels

“…In this respect, Ehrenfels understood the transmission of parental traits in mechanistic terms, under the influence of a generative force. Ehrenfels believed the genetic force , defined like Blumenbach’s formative drive ( nisus formativus or Bildungstrieb , see [ 61 ]), interacts with influences coming from the environment, both climatic and nutritional. It was strongest in its effect upon matings of the same sort.…”

Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding: Historical Background for Festetics’s Organic and Genetic Laws Four Decades Before Mendel’s Experiments in Peas

“…Contrary to what is generally assumed of the origin of the laws of heredity—often coupled with the experiments of Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884)—interest in studying the transmission of traits and their theoretical conceptualization began to emerge in the eighteenth century. There is a growing consensus that the concepts of biological heredity were gradually constructed from the knowledge scattered in different domains, such as philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, horticulture, and animal breeding (López-Beltrán 2006 ; Lidwell-Durnin 2020 ; McLaughlin 2007 , p. 281; Poczai and Santiago-Blay 2022 ). Thus, the formation of the epistemic space of heredity as a scientific discipline required assimilating ideas from several other disciplines.…”