|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his great-
grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and so
on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum of
all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the
inherited make-up. The trouble with this generalization, from the
modern Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what
``characters'' one would get in the one-half that came from one's
parents, or the one-fourth from one's grandparents. The whole of our
inheritance is not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional
parts. We are interested rather in those more specific traits or
characters, mental or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are
|
