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

Abstract

The upheavals of late eighteenth century Europe encouraged people to demand greater liberties, including the freedom to explore the natural world, individually or as part of investigative associations. The Moravian Agricultural and Natural Science Society, organized by Christian Carl André, was one such group of keen practitioners of theoretical and applied scientific disciplines. Headquartered in the “Moravian Manchester” Brünn (nowadays Brno), the centre of the textile industry, society members debated the improvement of sheep wool to fulfil the needs of the Habsburg armies fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Wool, as the raw material of soldiers' clothing, could influence the war’s outcome. During the early nineteenth century, wool united politics, economics, and science in Brno, where breeders and natural scientists investigated the possibilities of increasing wool production. They regularly discussed how “climate” or “seed” characteristics influenced wool quality and quantity. Breeders and academics put their knowledge into immediate practice to create sheep with better wool traits through consanguineous matching of animals and artificial selection. This apparent disregard for the incest taboo, however, was viewed as violating natural laws and cultural norms. The debate intensified between 1817 and 1820, when a Hungarian veteran soldier, sheep breeder, and self-taught natural scientist, Imre (Emmerich) Festetics, displayed his inbred Mimush sheep, which yielded wool extremely well suited for the fabrication of light but strong garments. Members of the Society questioned whether such “bastard sheep” would be prone to climatic degeneration, should be regarded as freaks of nature, or could be explained by natural laws. The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics’s “laws of organic functions” and “genetic laws of nature,” four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel’s seminal work on heredity in peas.

The little-known history of cleanliness and the forgotten pioneers of handwashing

“…We can only speculate as to whether Semmelweis knew about the work undertaken overseas. A ban on international literature did no good for scientific work in Central Europe between 1820 and 1848 (89)(90)(91). At least he might have read some of them around 1860 since he responded to criticism in great detail (92).…”

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

“…Brno’s early nineteenth-century sheep breeding debates were interwoven with philosophical and political debates on the nature of heredity [ 43 ]. Due to Spain’s exportation of fine wool from its Merinos or “noble sheep” during the Napoleonic Wars, quality wool from this breed became scarce in the years following 1800 [ 44 ] (pp.…”

“…The belief in the extraordinary position of humans had been firmly established by the Christian tradition for a very long time, and it was further strengthened by reference to what we today may refer to as intellectual capabilities. In spite of this, the widespread interest in sheep breeding that existed throughout Brno in the early nineteenth century led to the re-examination of the human–animal split, of the concept of a strictly hierarchical chain of Nature, and of hereditary aristocracy through the André affair (see [ 43 , 63 ]). However, according to Ehrenfels [ 1 ] not only animals but all organisms possess the genetic force whose influence on their appearance is greater than that of the climate.…”