Abstract
This paper explores Charles Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis through a popular and professional reception history. First published in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), pangenesis stated that inheritance can be explained by sub-cellular “gemmules” which aggregated in the sexual organs during intercourse. Pangenesis thereby accounted for the seemingly arbitrary absence and presence of traits in offspring while also clarifying some botanical and invertebrates’ limb regeneration abilities. I argue that critics largely interpreted Variation as an extension of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), while pangenesis was an extension of natural selection. Contrary to claims that pangenesis was divorced from natural selection by its reliance on the inheritance of acquired characters, pangenesis’s mid nineteenth-century reception suggests that Darwin’s hypothesis responded directly to selection’s critics. Using Variation’s several editions, periodical reviews, and personal correspondence I assess pangenesis popularly, professionally, and biographically to better understand Variation’s impact on 1860s and 70s British evolutionism and inheritance.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for all the people who have reviewed this article and discussed pangenesis with me over the years. My thanks go to Jon Klancher, Jeffrey Schwartz, Harriet Ritvo, Robert Richards, Gillian Beer, Dan Bivona, and the Editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project for access to unpublished material, particularly Shelley Innes, Alison Pearn, and Liz Smith. I also appreciate the travel grant support from Carnegie Mellon University that enabled me to visit Cambridge University’s Darwin Correspondence Project.
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Holterhoff, K. The History and Reception of Charles Darwin’s Hypothesis of Pangenesis. J Hist Biol 47, 661–695 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9377-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9377-0