pangenesis

…his own theory of “pangenesis,” in which each organ and tissue of an organism throws off tiny contributions of itself that are collected in the sex organs and determine the configuration of the offspring) could not account for the conservation of variations, because differences between variant offspring would be…

…devised the hypothesis known as pangenesis. He postulated that all organs of the body of a parent gave off invisible “seeds,” which were like miniaturized building components and were transmitted during sexual intercourse, reassembling themselves in the mother’s womb to form a baby.

This hypothesis he called pangenesis. Each part of the body was imagined to throw off invisible particles called “gemmules,” which, passing into the blood stream, were supposed to collect in the germ cells and there combine with like units already present, modifying them in accordance with the changes that…

…devised his hypothesis of “pangenesis” to explain the discrete inheritance of traits. He imagined that each tissue of an organism threw out tiny “gemmules,” which passed to the sex organs and permitted copies of themselves to be made in the next generation. But Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton failed to…