Inheritance of Habits

Abstract

PROF. MACBRIDE¹ and Mr. Maulik² have raised in the columns of NATURE the important question of the inheritance of acquired habits. Mr. Maulik, if I understand him correctly, states that the offspring of mice trained to run through a maze acquire the same habit more easily than their parents. A reference to the journal in which this remarkable result is published was not given. Mr. Maulik regards it as necessary, before conclusions are drawn, to obtain information as to the nature of the physical change produced by habit in the organism and its reproductive cells. While such information is desirable, it is surely a biological fact that some habits are inherited, even if we do not know the nature of the process of their inheritance. Thus the statistical laws of inheritance of human stature are known, though we have no idea, for example, how many genes are concerned in the process.