Abstract
THE comments on Dr. Bond's lecture to which Prof. Drummond refers, may be justified perhaps by zoological illustrations even if the botanists are unaware of any causes of mutation and have no evidence of reversion. For example, Müller has shown that when the eggs of normal specimens of Drosophila are subjected to X-ray radiation, they give rise to ‘ mutations ’ of the same kind as some of those which turn up in Morgan's cultures. Berndt, in discussing the ‘ fancy races’ of goldfish, admits that the cause of the production of ‘ mutants ’ is aquarium conditions. In a word, the general cause of mutations may be described as ‘germ-damage’ due to bad environmental conditions acting at a critical period of growth. As to reversion, Morgan himself encountered this in some of his extreme mutants and described it as ‘ mutation backwards.’ It can be seen any day in the London squares, where a considerable proportion of our escaped dovecote pigeons are rapidly returning to the ancestral form of Columba livia.
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THE WRITER OF THE NOTES ‘Sports’ and ‘Reversion’. Nature 121, 575 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121575c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121575c0
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