Abstract
ONE of the most striking facts in modern biology is the discovery that hereditary differences commonly behave as independent fixed units, handed on generation after generation according to various characteristic but simple laws. The differences so transmitted may be large or they may be very minute, but they in some way maintain their identity through out the welter of events which constitute the passage from one generation of adults to another: that is, the maturation of the germ cells and the development of the individual. Clearly a physical difference main tained in successive generations among individuals developing in the same environment must be due to an initial difference in the germinal material. Such differences are, moreover, as a rule equally inherited through either the egg or the sperm in crosses. The only structural materials in the germ cells of higher organisms which fulfil these requirements for trans mission are the chromosomes.
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GATES, R. Aspects of Physical and Mental Inheritance1. Nature 118, 663–665 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118663a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118663a0