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发表于 2010-9-30 19:20:52
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以下内容来自英国著名医学杂志《柳叶刀》
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The Lancet. 2002, Volume 359, Issue 9313, Pages 1256-1256.
《柳叶刀》2002年,第359卷,9313期,1256页 B. Bynum.
Discarded diagnoses - telegony
被废弃的诊断——先父遗传
In 1820, the Earl of Morton, FRS, communicated to the Royal Society of London, UK, a “singular fact”. In attempting to domesticate the quagga—a zebra-like, South American member of the horse family (now extinct)—he was forced to breed a male with a female Arabian mare. The resulting hybrid was predictable, but the singularity appeared when the Arabian mare was subsequently mated with an Arabian stallion: their offspring possessed colour and hair characteristics of the quagga.
1820年,FRS的莫顿伯爵,写信给英国伦敦皇家学会,称他发现了一个"奇异的事情" 。他在试图驯养斑驴(一种马,产于南美,外型象斑马,现已绝迹)时 ,这匹雄性斑驴与一匹雌性阿拉伯母驴交配,杂交的结果正常。但后来怪事出现了,那匹阿拉伯母驴后来与一匹阿拉伯种马交配后,他们的后代拥有斑驴的肤色及毛发特征。
Animal breeders had long worried that prized pure-bred females— whether of horses, pigs, sheep, or dogs—would be forever contaminated were they allowed to copulate with a male of impure blood. The first impregnation had lasting consequences, since the fetus “inoculated” the mother’s blood and through it her whole being with characteristics of its sire. This doctrine carried scientific respectability throughout the 19th century: Claude Bernard, Charles Darwin, and many other shrewd observers accepted the observational evidence and elaborated theories to account for it. They called it “infection of the germ”, a neat instance of a modern sounding phrase with an obsolete meaning: the fetus permanently affecting the mother’s reserve eggs. This idea was given its impressive Greek name, telegony (“at a distance”and “offspring”) by August Weismann (1834–1914), the German biologist whose rigorous separation of somatic and germinal cells cast doubt on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Weismann believed his notion of the germ plasm could explain telegony, should it be shown to exist, but he doubted its reality.
动物饲养着一直以来都在担心珍贵的纯种雌性动物(无论是马,猪,羊,狗)如果与一个非纯种的雄性动物交配,她们的纯种特性将永远被污染。第一次的受精将会影响持久,因为胚胎不但"接种"了母亲的血液,还包括所有和她交配过的雄性。这一学说在19世纪一直得到科学界的认可: Claude Bernard, Charles Darwin和其他许多精明的观察家接受了观测证据,并阐述理论进行解释。他们称之为"细菌感染" ,意思是“胎儿永久影响母亲的储备卵子”。August Weismann(1834年~1914年,德国生物学家)给这一理论起了一个令人印象深刻的希腊名字, telegony ( "距离"和"后代" ) ,他仔细的分离肉体和生发细胞,对特征遗传提出质疑。Weismann相信他的关于遗传物质的概念可以解释telegony,它可能是真的,但Weismann怀疑其真实性。
Although always largely an animal breeders’ issue, telegony was also invoked in ideas about human inheritance. Imperialists found it a convenient explanation of the decimation of aboriginal groups after contact with Europeans, the assumption being that their women became less fertile after cohabitation with white men. The offspring of widows in second marriages were often believed to favour the woman’s deceased husband. Emile Zola used the theory as a theme in his novel Madeleine Férat (1868). Experiments by Weismann and the Scottish naturalist J C Ewart cast doubt on the accuracy of the animal observations. The statistician Karl Pearson pointed out that, were telegony true, the later children of the same couple ought increasingly to resemble the father, which he showed was not the case. With the triumph of theories of hard heredity, telegony disappeared. It had not all been doom and gloom, however. Within popular culture, the doctrine offered women a bit of freedom in marriage, since adulterous offspring were believed to resemble the legal father more than the biological one. Hence the proverb: “filium ex adultera excusare matrem a culpa”.
尽管这个是动物饲养者的关注的问题, telegony还引起了人类遗传的问题。帝国主义者通过它找到了一个方便的解释,用于大批屠杀与欧洲人接触的土著居民。他们认为土著妇女与白人男性同居后,将会less fertile;寡妇第二次婚姻的后代会更像她已故的丈夫。Emile Zola用这个理论作为主题,写了小说Madeleine Férat ( 1868 ) 。Weismann的实验和苏格兰博物学家 J C Ewart怀疑其观察结果的准确性。统计学家Karl Pearson指出, 假如telegony属实,一对夫妇的几个孩子中,越小的孩子应该越像父亲,而他发现事实并非如此。随着遗传学的胜利, telegony理论被淘汰了。但它没有完全消失,在通俗文化中,该学说为已婚妇女提供了一点自由,因为按照该理论,通奸产生的后代会酷似其法律上的父亲,而非生物学上的。所以谚语说: "filium ex adultera excusare matrem a culpa" 。
Bill Bynum
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of
Medicine at UCL, 24 Eversholt Street,
London NW1 1AD, UK |
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