There is no lack of utility and direct application in the study of Genetics. I have alluded to some strictly practical results. If we want to raise mangels that will not run to seed, or to breed a cow that will give more milk in less time, or milk with more butter and less water, we can turn to Genetics with every hope that something can be done in these laudable directions. But here I would plead what I cannot but regard as a higher usefulness in our work. Genetic inquiry aims at providing knowledge that may bring, and I think will bring, certainty into a region of human affairs and concepts which might have been supposed reserved for ages to be the domain of the visionary. We have long known that it was believed by some that our powers and conduct were dependent on our physical composition, and that other schools have maintained that nurture not nature, to use Galton's antithesis, has a preponderating influence on our careers; but so soon as it becomes common knowledge – not a philosophical speculation, but a certainty – that liability to a disease, or the power of resisting its attack, addiction to a particular vice, or to superstition, is due to the presence or absence of a specific ingredient; and finally that these characteristics are transmitted to the offspring according to definite, predicable rules, then man's views of his own nature, his conceptions of justice, in short his whole outlook on the world, must be profoundly changed. Yet as regards the more tangible of these physical and mental characteristics there can be little doubt that before many years have passed the laws of their transmission will be expressible in simple formulae.
The blundering cruelty we call criminal justice will stand forth divested of natural sanction, a relic of the ferocious inventions of the savage. Well may such justice be portrayed as blind. Who shall say whether it is crime or punishment which has wrought the greater suffering in the world? We may live to know that to the keen satirical vision of Sam Butler on the pleasant mountains of Erewhon there was revealed a dispensation, not kinder only, but wiser than the terrific code which Moses delivered from the flames of Sinai.
If there are societies which refuse to apply the new knowledge, the fault will not lie with Genetics. I think it needs but little observation of the newer civilisations to foresee that they will apply every scrap of scientific knowledge which can help them, or seems to help them in the struggle, and I am good enough Selectionist to know that in that day the fate of the recalcitrant communities is sealed.
The thrill of discovery is not dulled by a suspicion that the discovery can be applied. No harm is done to the investigator if he can resist the temptation to deviate from his aim. With rarest exceptions the discoveries which have formed the basis of physical progress have been made without any thought but for the gratification of curiosity. Of this there can be few examples more conspicuous than that which Mendel's work presents. Untroubled by any itch to make potatoes larger or bread cheaper, he set himself in the quiet of a cloister garden to find out the laws of hybridity, and so struck a mine of truth, inexhaustible in brilliancy and profit.
I will now suggest to you that it is by no means unlikely that even in an inquiry so remote as that which I just described in the case of the Sweet Pea, we may have the clue to a mystery which concerns us all in the closest possible way. I mean the problem of the physiological nature of Sex. In speaking of the interpretation of sexual difference suggested by our experimental work as of some practical moment, I do not imply that as in the other instances I have given, the knowledge is likely to be of immediate use to our species; but only that if true it makes a contribution to the stock of human ideas which no one can regard as insignificant.
In the light of Mendelian knowledge, when a family consists of more than one type the fact means that the germ-cells of one or other parent must certainly be of more than one kind. In the case of sex the members of the family are thus of two kinds, and the presumption is overwhelming that this distinction is due to a difference among the germ-cells. Next, since for all practical purposes the numbers of the two sexes produced are approximately equal, sex exhibits the special case in which a family consists of two types represented in equal numbers, half being male, half female. But I called your attention to the fact that equality of types results when one parent was cross-bred in the character concerned, having received one dose only of the factor on which it depends. So we may feel fairly sure that the distinction between the sexes depends on the presence in one or other of them of an unpaired factor. This conclusion appears to me to follow so immediately on all that we have learnt of genetic physiology that with every confidence we may accept it as representing the actual fact.
The question which of the two sexes contains the unpaired factor is less easy to answer, but there are several converging lines of evidence which point to the deduction that in Vertebrates at least, and in some other types, it is the female, and I feel little doubt that we shall succeed in proving that in them femaleness is a definite Mendelian factor absent from the male and following the ordinary Mendelian rules.
Before showing you how the Sweet Pea phenomenon aids in this inquiry I must tell you of some other experimental results. The first concerns the common currant moth, Abraxas grossulariata. It has a definite pale variety called lacticolor. With these two forms Doncaster has made a remarkable series of experiments. When he began, lacticolor was only known as a female form. This was crossed with the grossulariata male and gave grossulariata only, showing that the male was pure to type. The hybrids bred together gave grossulariata males and females and lacticolor females only. But the hybrid males bred to lacticolor females produced all four combinations, grossulariata males and females, and lacticolor males and females. When the lacticolor males were bred to grossulariata females, whether hybrid, or wild from a district where lacticolor does not exist, the result was that all the males were grossulariata and all the females lacticolor! It is difficult to follow the course of such an experiment on once hearing and all I ask you to remember is first that there is a series of matings giving very curious distributions of the characters of type and variety among the two sexes. And then, what is perhaps the most singular fact of all, that the wild typical grossulariata female can when crossed with the lacticolor male produce all females lacticolor. This last fact can, we know, mean only one thing, namely that these wild females are in reality hybrids of lacticolor; though since the males are pure grossulariata, that fact would in the natural course of things never be revealed.
When we encounter such a series of phenomena as this, our business is to find a means of symbolical expression which will represent all the factors involved, and show how each behaves in descent. Such a system or scheme we have at length discovered, and I incline to think that it must be the true one. If you study this case you will find that there are nine distinct kinds of matings that can be made between the variety, the type and the hybrid, and the scheme fits the whole group of results. It is based on two suppositions:
1. That the female is cross-bred, or as we call it heterozygous for femaleness-factor, the male being without that factor. The eggs are thus each destined from the first to become either males or females, but as regards sex the spermatozoa are alike in being non-female.