Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
A Defense of Beanbag Genetics*
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My friend Professor Ernst Mayr, of Harvard University, in his recent book Animal Species and Evolution1, which I find admirable, though I disagree with quite a lot of it, has the following sentences on page 263.
The Mendelian was apt to compare the genetic contents of a population to a bag full of colored beans. Mutation was the exchange of one kind of bean for another. This conceptualization has been referred to as "beanbag genetics". Work in population and developmental genetics has shown, however, that the thinking of beanbag genetics is in many ways quite misleading. To consider genes as independent units is meaningless from the physiological as well as the evolutionary viewpoint.Any kind of thinking whatever is misleading out of its context. Thus ethical thinking involves the concept of duty, or some equivalent, such as righteousness or dharma. Without such a concept one is lost in
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