Genetic Prehistory In Selective Breeding

Before Mendel, who came closest to the truth about heredity? This title examines the activities of sheep breeders able to transform the appearance and qualities of their stock by combining different traits of body or wool into patterns. Exploiting what were then untried procedures - individual trait selection, very close inbreeding and progeny testing - they demonstrated inheritance from both sexes and showed how it could be stabilized.

Major advances in breeding are associated with the English farmer Robert Bakewell (1725-1795). By the following century, when the same procedures had been established at breeding centres in central Europe, theory as well as practice became the subject of wider attention. In the Bruno Sheep Breeders' Society, discussions of patterns of heredity finally gave way to the physiological question, What is inherited and how?

The question was posed by Cyrill Napp, abbot of the monastery to which Mendel was admitted six years later. Review: This is a very valuable book analysing the period of animal breeding, especially sheep, before the discovering of heredity laws by Gregor Mendel. Folia Mendeliana Historians of technology will find here a rich case study of the diffusion of a technology, and the book's implications for the relations of science and technology are significant.

British Journal for the History of Science In illuminating the milieu in which Mendel worked, Wood and Orel add usefully to our knowledge of nineteenth-century conceptions of heredity. British Journal for the History of Science Over the last 30 years Orel and Wood have reconstructured the context of Mendel's work more thoroughly than anyone else.

This book is a welcome culmination of that project, integrating the various strands of their work into one long argument. British Journal for the History of Science Wood and Orel's book offers answers both intriguing and persuasive. British Journal for the History of Science Historians of genetics will find Wood and Orel's case compelling.

Journal of the History of Biology ... an interesting and a stimulating study. They have undertaken an impressive amount of research in the archives on sheep-breeding in Europe in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, and presented their findings and conclusions clearly and logically. I learnt a lot from the book.

Nature