Word: mendelianism
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...qualities. Some were valuable because they were susceptible to polio, others were prone to nervous crises. Certain yellow mice (which grow fat with age) were used in the study of fatty (liposarcoma) cancers. Certain long-cherished strains were used in educational institutions all over the country to illustrate the Mendelian laws of inheritance...
...What we started to do," said Dr. Spiegelman, "was to find out how genes operate." Genes are infinitesimal bodies (perhaps single protein molecules) in the nucleus of every living cell, from bacteria to man. According to orthodox, "Mendelian" biology, they are the sole arbiters of heredity. When a cell divides, each gene divides too, and transmits a definite characteristic to the "daughter" cells...
Researchers try to find out whether such anomalies are passed on as Mendelian "dominants" or "recessives"; also, whether they are carried by a single gene (inheritance transmitter in the chromosomes of the germ cells) or by multiple genes...
...19th Century, reached into the 20th. The tendency was to doubt that natural selection-the slow combing out and accumulation of small variations-could carry the whole burden of evolution. Many scientists grew so contemptuous of natural selection that they called it pure fiction. Darwin knew nothing of the Mendelian heredity laws, nothing about the mechanism of mutations (sudden, conspicuous changes in plants and animals which subsequently breed true because of changes in the germ plasm). With the discovery of mutations some biologists decided that nothing else was necessary for evolution...
...Agriculture's official journal, which published the letter last week, under the headline: "Chase Formal Genetics from the Universities!" Charles Darwin was okay, the students said in effect, but Mendel and Morgan were way off the party line, if not downright counterrevolutionary. To capitalist hell with the Mendelian...