Abstract
II.
FIRST let me point out a fact which Quetelet and all writers who have followed in his paths have unaccountably overlooked, and which has an intimate bearing on our work to-night. It is that, although characteristics of plants and animals conform to the law, the reason of their doing so is as yet totally unexplained. The essence of the law is that differences should be wholly due to the collective actions of a host of independent petty influences in various combinations, as was represented by the teeth of the harrow, among which the pellets tumbled in various ways. Now the processes of heredity that limit the number of the children of one class such as giants, that diminish their resemblance to their fathers, and kill many of them, are not petty influences, but very important ones. Any selective tendency is ruin to the law of deviation, yet among the processes of heredity there is the large influence of natural selection. The conclusion is of the greatest importance to our problem. It is, that the processes of heredity must work harmoniously with the law of deviation, and be themselves in some sense conformable to it. Each of the processes must show this conformity separately, quite irrespectively of the rest. It is not an admissible hypothesis that any two or more of them, such as reversion and natural selection, should follow laws so exactly inverse to one another that the one should reform what the other had deformed, because characteristics, in which the relative importance of the various processes is very different, are none the less capable of conforming closely to the typical condition.
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Typical Laws of Heredity 1 . Nature 15, 512–514 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015512b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015512b0