ネーゲリと遺伝学
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概要
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Carl Wilhelm von Nageli (1817-1891), the German physiologist, is well known as the author of his later work, Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre (1884). He has often been criticized because he could not understand Mendel's papers on botanical hybrids. However, many other investigators who read Mendel's papers before 1900 also failed to appreciate their significance. Nageli's failure, therefore, must not be attributed to Nageli himself, but to absence of the conceptual framework with which we understand Mendelism today. Hugo Iltis, in his biography of Mendel, criticized Nageli's attitude toward Mendel, but this criticism is not fair, for Iltis did not consider the series of Nageli's papers published in 1865-1866 which are indispensable to evaluate him properly. Nageli had already established his theory of heredity before he received the letter from Mendel. It was Mendel himself who singled out Nageli from among his many contemporaries as the one who might be expected to appreciate his papers, although his expectation turned out to be in vain. In view of the general state of biology in the middle of the nineteenth century, it would have been difficult at that time to devise a conceptual framework which could adequately synthesize two such different conceptions as heredity and evolution. The main theory of hybridization in the nineteenth century was that of "blending inheritance", and Nageli must have understood heredity according to this theory and not in terms of the independently inherited unit character. People in the nineteenth century were generally interested in fertility and sterility of hybrids, and both were easily dealt with at the level of the individual. I examined Abstammungslehre to find out whether Nageli's theory of heredity came to be somewhat modified through his correspondence with Mendel and concluded that Nageli was still forever entrenched in the framework of blending inheritance.
- 日本科学史学会の論文
- 1976-01-31