Family traits

Usage examples of heredity.

From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?

In these animals modified by heredity, the two eyes generally protruded, although in the parents usually only one showed exophthalmia, the lesion having been made in most cases only on one of the corpora restiformia.

The general abandonment of the Darwinian hypothesis by biologists, adverted to in our next chapter, is mainly due to the failure of heredity to account for the gradual modification of organs and of habits.

It seems probable that morality is to a considerable extent a matter of heredity, and the care of the eugenist should be to work with every force that makes for a clear understanding of the moral factors of the world, and to work against every force that tends to confuse the issues.

The eugenist only asks that both factors be taken into account, whereas in the past the factor of heredity has been too often ignored.

Reverend Elial Starbuck thus ruminated about heredity, slavery, and feeblemindedness as he rode across the hot battlefield, yet he did not entirely ignore the cries that came from the parched, hurting men left helpless by the fighting.

Traits like these, which are easily defined and occur very rarely, make up a large part of the cases of probably Mendelian heredity.

They are little more than curiosities, their rarity and abnormal nature depriving them of evolutionary significance other than to demonstrate that Mendelian heredity does operate in man.

In human heredity, on the other hand, because of the great difficulties attendant upon an application of Mendelian methods, the biometric mode of attack is still the most useful, and has been largely used in the present book.

Most of the experiments have been with lower animals and with plants, but recent experiments and statistical studies show that Mendelism is an important factor in human heredity, in such characteristics as color of hair and eyes and skin, partial color blindness, defects of eye, ear, and other important organs.

The only difference between the two pictures is that in the modern one the concepts of heredity and adaptation have been formed without special application to the ethical characteristics of the soul.

He conducted experiments with chemicals, investigated methods of coal mining and canal building, toured salt mines, speculated on the mechanisms of heredity, collected fossils, and propounded theories on rain, the composition of air, and the laws of motion, among much else.

That, in turn, drew him back to the other truth of that source, that his accomplishments with the sword and the gemstones were not solely the result of heredity.

Among those of his relations who professed the modern faith of heredity it was well understood that in him the character of the late Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the glimpses of the moon - by which orb Bayne had in his lifetime been sufficiently affected to be a poet of no small Colonial distinction.

Just as in the lifetime of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity so write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared, even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently.