Did Paul Kammerer discover epigenetic inheritance? No and why not.
In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Vargas presents a new, epigenetic explanation of Paul Kammerer's controversial midwife toad experiments, but he has constructed his model without first reading Kammerer's original articles. A look at the articles shows that Vargas is seriously misinformed about what Kammerer did and what the results even were. His model simply cannot explain the results as they were originally reported and it cannot easily be corrected. Similarly, Vargas' historical inferences about the Kammerer affair, Kammerer's priority for the discovery of parent-of-origin effects, and the negative reactions of geneticists to this purported discovery, are unsupported and do not stand up to scrutiny.
Gliboff
Sander
S
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, 1011 E. 3rd St.,Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. sgliboff@indiana.edu
D000818:Animals; D003433:Crosses, Genetic; D044127:Epigenesis, Genetic; D005260:Female; D005823:Genetics / Q000266:history; D049673:History, 20th Century; D040582:Inheritance Patterns; D008297:Male; D008957:Models, Genetic