History

• Pangenesis, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1868, is a developmental theory of heredity where specific particles, later called gemmules, carry information from various parts of the body to the reproductive organs, from where they are passed to the embryo at the moment of conception.
• Jean Baptiste de Lamarck proposed the inheritance of acquired characteristics, where traits acquired during one’s lifetime become incorporated into one’s hereditary information and are passed on to offspring.
• Aristotle rejected the concepts of pangenesis and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, stating that people sometimes resemble past ancestors more than their parents and that acquired characteristics such as mutilated body parts are not passed on.
• According to Aristotle, both males and females make contributions to the offspring and there is a struggle of sorts between male and female contributions.
• Pythagoras proposed that every organ of animal body gives out some type of vapours, which unite and form a new individual.
• Hippocrates believed that the reproductive material is handed over from all parts of the body of an individual, so that the characters are directly handed over to the progeny.
• Aristotle thought that the semen of man has some “vitalizing” effect and he considered it as the highly purified blood.
• According to Aristotle, the mother furnishes inert matter and the father gives the motion to the new life.
• Hippocrates proposed that all the structure of the adult was present in the zygote.
• Anaxagoras believed instead that all parts of the child were preformed in the paternal semen.
• William Harvey proposed that an organism is derived from substances present in the egg that differentiate into adult structures during embryonic development.
• Gregor Johann Mendel proposed the concept of blending inheritance, stating that offspring are a blend, or mixture, of parental traits and that the genetic material itself blends.
• Maupertuis proposed that the body of each parent gives rise minute particles, which unite together to form a new individual in sexual reproduction.
• Maupertuis also proposed the concept of biparental inheritance by elementary particles.