THE UNIQUENESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 



possible, and avoiding those in which there is a suspicion of 

 corrupt advocacy. 



3a. lamarckian inheritance in 

 higher organisms 



(i) The inheritance of eye-defects induced by specific atitisera. 

 Guyer and Smith (1918, 1920, 1924), although not themselves 

 'particularly interested in establishing or disestablishing any 

 ism"*, claimed to have shown that eye defects induced in rabbit 

 foetuses by the injection of pregnant does with anti-lens serum 

 were reproduced in successive generations born of the affected 

 rabbits. In a representative experiment, rabbits'* lenses were 

 pulped and injected into chickens to elicit the formation of 

 anti-lens precipitating antibodies. The antiserum so formed 

 was injected into pregnant does. A small proportion of the 

 offspring were born with eye abnormalities ranging from 

 opacity and mis- shapenness of the lens to an apparently com- 

 plete ''liquefaction''. These induced differences of eye structure 

 were inherited, in roughly the manner of a Mendelian re- 

 cessive, through both male and female lines. 



With variations that may have been significant, these claims 

 were tested by three independent groups of workers (Finlay, 

 1924; Huxley and Carr-Saunders, 1924; Ibsen and Bushnell, 

 1931, 1934) with negative results. The findings of Guyer and 

 Smith therefore remained in the penumbra of unexplained 

 anomalies until Sturtevant (1944) proposed a prima facie 

 genetical case for their acceptance. Following a train of 

 thought started by M. R. Irwin and J. B. S. Haldane he argued 

 that, in as much as there is in general a one-to-one correspond- 

 ence between particular antigens and particular genes, an 

 antigen may be *"a rather direct gene product** and may be 

 imprinted with some of the structural specificity of the gene. 

 'If a particular gene is responsible for the formation of a given 



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