Let me tell you about what I learned today
So today we were reviewing the history of humans understanding genetics and heredity and we were going over early theories. Of these, you had two basic trains of thought (this is in the 1800's): The Pangenesis theory (one of the things Darwin Got Wrong) which is basically that traits derived from all parts of the body are incorporated into the gametes. In other words, acquired traits are passed down.
The Germ Plasm theory on the other hand, concludes that all information passed on to the next generation is already contained within the gametes. Acquired traits are not passed along.
We now know that Pangenesis theory is bunk and here's how we know:
This guy, Weissman. He took a bunch of rats. He lopped off their tails. He bred the tail-less rats together. Pangensis theory predicts that these rats would give birth to tail-less offspring. Of course, all the babies had tails. So he repeated this process a bunch of times, just to be sure.
Fuck man science is pretty brutal. But for some reason, I find this whole experiment impossibly, darkly hilarious. Early scientists were so hardcore.
