Lord Morton’s Marenbsp;
Lord Morton’s Mare was once an often noticed example in the history
of evolutionary theory.
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Lord Morton's QuaggLord Morton's Quagga, by Jacques Laurent Agasse
(Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons). |
In 1820,
George Douglas, 16th Earl of
Morton, F.R.S., reported to the President of the Royal Society
that being desirous of domesticating the quagga, he had bred an
Arabian chestnut mare with a quagga stallion (
1),
and that subsequently Lord Morton bred the same mare with a white
stallion and found that the offspring had strange stripes in the
legs, like the quagga. The Royal Society published Lord Morton's
letter in its Philosophical Transactions, 1821. In the same issue
"Particulars of a Fact, nearly similar to that related by Lord
Morton, communicated to the President, in a letter from Daniel
Giles, Esq." reported that in a litter of a black and white sow, by
a "boar of the wild breed, the chestnut colour of the boar strongly
prevailed" in the piglets, even to the third subsequent litter.
These circumstantial reports seemed to confirm the ancient idea
of telegony in heritability: Charles Darwin cited the example in On
the Origin of Species (1859) and The Variation of Animals and Plants
under Domestication (1868). The concept of telegony, that the seed
of a male could continue to affect the offspring of a female,
whether animal or human, had been inherited from Aristotle and
remained a legitimate theory until experiments in the 1890s
confirmed Mendelian inheritance. Biologists now explain the
phenomenon of Lord Morton's mare using dominant and recessive
alleles.
Notes:>1. A quagga, now extinct, was
a relative of the zebra.
See also:
Douglas Livestock
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