RESUMO
The upheavals of late eighteenth century Europe encouraged people to demand greater liberties, including the freedom to explore the natural world, individually or as part of investigative associations. The Moravian Agricultural and Natural Science Society, organized by Christian Carl André, was one such group of keen practitioners of theoretical and applied scientific disciplines. Headquartered in the "Moravian Manchester" Brünn (nowadays Brno), the centre of the textile industry, society members debated the improvement of sheep wool to fulfil the needs of the Habsburg armies fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Wool, as the raw material of soldiers' clothing, could influence the war's outcome. During the early nineteenth century, wool united politics, economics, and science in Brno, where breeders and natural scientists investigated the possibilities of increasing wool production. They regularly discussed how "climate" or "seed" characteristics influenced wool quality and quantity. Breeders and academics put their knowledge into immediate practice to create sheep with better wool traits through consanguineous matching of animals and artificial selection. This apparent disregard for the incest taboo, however, was viewed as violating natural laws and cultural norms. The debate intensified between 1817 and 1820, when a Hungarian veteran soldier, sheep breeder, and self-taught natural scientist, Imre (Emmerich) Festetics, displayed his inbred Mimush sheep, which yielded wool extremely well suited for the fabrication of light but strong garments. Members of the Society questioned whether such "bastard sheep" would be prone to climatic degeneration, should be regarded as freaks of nature, or could be explained by natural laws. The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics's "laws of organic functions" and "genetic laws of nature," four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel's seminal work on heredity in peas.
Assuntos
Genética , Hereditariedade , Ovinos , Animais , Endogamia , Pisum sativum/genética , Lã , Europa (Continente) , Genética/históriaRESUMO
It is now common knowledge-but also a misbelief-that in 1905 William Bateson coined the term 'genetics' for the first time in his letter to Adam Sedgwick. This important term was already formulated 81 years ago in a paper written by a sheepbreeding noble called Imre (Emmerich) Festetics, who still remains somewhat mysterious even today. The articles written by Festetics summarized the results of a series of lasting and elegant breeding experiments he had conducted on his own property. Selecting the best rams, Festetics had painstakingly crossed and backcrossed his best sheep to reach better wool quality. These experiments later turned out to reveal a better understanding of inheritance outlining genetics as a new branch of natural sciences.