[Ttha-potm] "Heredity"

[Niemeyer, Paul J.]

Thanks for your provocative reading, Dale.  To add to it, a possible "back-story" might be not Mendel, but August Weismann, whose theory on the "germ plasm" was gaining a following in the late 1880s / early 1890s and was a subject of Spencer and Weismann's famous "debate" in the pages of Critical Review in 1893.  Weismann's idea was that germ plasm was an immortal--meaning constantly self-reproducing through the generations--substance that is passed biologically from parents to children and which determines the child's appearance and behavior.  The germ plasm is the sum of previous generations, so common traits can appear in subsequent generations.  I don't know all the in's and out's of Weismann's theory, but he was apparently in the neighborhood of Mendelian genetics, but ultimately he missed it by a good deal.
 
What it comes down to is that there was an understanding in the 1880s and '90s of inherent qualities that an individual can inherit from the distant past.  The controversy was if behaviors could be passed down.  Spencer of course believed that learned behaviors could be inheritable; but Weismann--and, I think, Hardy--took the view that there are behaviors carried in the blood, as inevitable as the tide and as unstoppable as fate.
 
Best,
 
Paul Niemeyer
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