http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/9036983

The organism as a whole, from a physico-chemical viewpoint

"In this book an attempt is made to show that the unity of the organism is due to the fact that the egg (or rather its cytoplasm) is the future embryo upon which the Mendelian factors in the chromosomes can impress only individual characteristics, probably by giving rise to special hormones and enzymes. We can cause an egg to develop into an organism without a spermatozoon, but apparently we cannot make a spermatozoon develop into an organism without the cytoplasm of an egg, although sperm and egg nucleus transmit equally the Mendelian characters. The conception that the cytoplasm of the egg is already the embryo in the rough may be of importance also for the problem of evolution since it suggests the possibility that the genus- and species-heredity are determined by the cytoplasm of the egg, while the Mendelian hereditary characters cannot contribute at all or only to a limited extent to the formation of new species. Such an idea is supported by the work on immunity, which shows that genus- and probably species-specificity are due to specific proteins, while the Mendelian characters may be determined by hormones which need neither be proteins nor specific or by enzymes which also need not be specific for the species or genus. Such a conception would remove the difficulties which the work on Mendelian heredity has seemingly created not only for the problem of evolution but also for the problem of the harmonious character of the organism as a whole"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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