On A New Confirmation of Mendel’s Laws

Abstract

In the discussion on genetics that took place in the autumn of 1939 much attention was paid to checking whether or not Mendel’s laws were really true. In the basic discussion on the validity of the entire concept of Mendel, it was quite reasonable and natural to concentrate on the simplest case, which, according to Mendel, results in splitting in the ratio 3:1. For this simplest case of crossing Aa ×Aa, with the feature A dominating over the feature a, it is well known that Mendel’s concept leads to the conclusion that in a sufficiently numerous progeny (no matter whether it consists of one family or involves many separate families resulting from various pairs of heterozygous parents of type Aa) the ratio between the number of individuals with the feature A (that is, the individuals of the type AA or Aa) to the number of individuals with the feature a (aa type) should be close to the ratio 3:1. T.K. Enin [1], [2], N.I. Ermolaeva [3] and E. Kol’man [4] have concentrated on checking this simplest consequence of Mendel’s concept. However, Mendel’s concept not only results in this simplest conclusion on the approximate ratio 3:1 but also makes it possible to predict the average deviations from this ratio. Owing to this it is the statistical analysis of deviations from the ratio 3:1 that gives a new, more subtle and exhaustive way of proving Mendel’s ideas on feature splitting. In this paper we will try to indicate what we think to be the most rational methods of such checking and to illustrate these methods on the material of the paper by N.I. Ermolaeva [3]. In contrast to the opinion of Ermolaeva herself, this material proved to be a brilliant new confirmation of Mendel’s laws.¹

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Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR27 (1940), 38-42 (in Russian).