Отрывок из книги
Michael F. Guyer
Published by Good Press, 2022
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Parent Body and Germ Not Identical.—Inasmuch as each new individual appears to arise from material derived from its parent, taking the evidence at its face value one might suppose that any peculiarity of organization called forth in the living substance of the parent would naturally be repeated in the offspring, but a closer study of the developing organism from its first inception to maturity shows this to be probably a wrong conclusion. The parent-body and the reproductive substance contained in that body are by no means identical. It becomes an important question to decide, in fact, how much effect, if any, either permanent or temporary, the parent-body really has on the germ.
A given fertile germ (Fig. 2, p. 13) gives rise by a succession of divisions to a body which we call the individual, but such a germ also gives rise to a series of new germ-cells which reside in that individual, and it is these germ-cells, not something derived from the body, that pass on the determiners of distinguishing features or qualities from generation to generation. It is only by grasping the significance of this fact that we can understand how in certain cases a totally different set of characters may appear in an offspring than those manifested in either parent.
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