Page:A critique of the theory of evolution.djvu/66

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

even when, as in this case, there is a perfectly graded series from one end to the other, by testing out individually enough of the flies to show that one-fourth of them never produce any descendants but ebonies, one-fourth never any but sooties, and one-half of them give rise to both ebony and sooty.

Mendel's Second Discovery—Independent Assortment

Besides his discovery that there are pairs of characters that disjoin, as it were, in the germ cells of the hybrid (law of segregation) Mendel made a second discovery which also has far-reaching consequences. The following case illustrates Mendel's second law.

If a pea that is yellow and round is crossed to one that is green and wrinkled (fig. 21), all of the offspring are yellow and round. Inbred, these give 9 yellow round, 3 green round, 3 yellow wrinkled, 1 green wrinkled. All the yellows taken together are to the green as 3:1. All the round taken together are to the wrinkled as three to one; but some of the yellows are now wrinkled and some of the green are now