Blending inheritance
obsolete theory in biology
Blending inheritance is an obsolete theory in biology from the 19th century. The theory is that the progeny inherits any characteristic as the average of the parents' values of that characteristic. As an example of this, a crossing of a red flower variety with a white variety of the same species would yield pink-flowered offspring.
Charles Darwin's theory of inheritance by pangenesis, with contributions to egg or sperm from every part of the body, implied blending inheritance. His reliance on this mechanism led Fleeming Jenkin to attack Darwin's theory of natural selection on the grounds that blending inheritance would average out any novel beneficial characteristic before selection had time to act.
Blending inheritance was discarded with the general acceptance of particulate inheritance during the development of modern genetics, after c. 1900.
History
Darwin's pangenesis
Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection on the basis of an understanding of uniform processes in geology, acting over very long periods of time on inheritable variation within populations. One of those processes was competition for resources, as Thomas Malthus had indicated, leading to a struggle to survive and to reproduce. Since some individuals would by chance have traits that allowed them to leave more offspring, those traits would tend to increase in the population. Darwin assembled many lines of evidence to show that variation occurred and that artificial selection by animal and plant breeding had caused change.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blending inheritance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.