"It's all gone wrong for me"1 - no, not the hungover cry of the ethanol-loving undergraduate, but the familiar wail of another lab cock up.
Mine, sometimes; yours, occasionally; and historic, from time to time.
 
1 Bill Bailey, 2001

Striped Out

Of all the weird and wonderful theories about heredity, telegony, “offspring at a distance”, has to be the most interesting and horrendously misused. This is the singular theory that previous males who have impregnated a female will inflict their characteristics on her offspring from a current partner. Fathered by Aristotle and rediscovered with the re-emergence of his works in the Middle Ages, it's actually more of a mishmash of a couple of theories – prepotency – the idea that some individuals impress their characteristics on their offspring more effectively than others (a natural skill perhaps, like possessing better balance) – and maternal impressionability – the idea that the events experienced by a pregnant female would impress upon the foetus. These beliefs naturally excuse the monitoring and controlling the movements and actions of women and maternal impressionability is even found in the Bible, where Laban of the Book of Genesis produced striped lambs by showing pregnant ewes striped hazel rods.

Telegony is, of course, intimately tied with the patriarchal concept that females have control over pregnancy and childbirth and keep it a secret from males to disempower and annoy them (e.g. by harvesting their sperm and “keeping” it until they choose to conceive). Even Henry VIII was concerned about this possibility, which may explain why he murdered one of his wives and changed the religion of an entire country by force in order to rid himself of another. Neither is it dissimilar to modern Christian doctrines who say that a woman cannot become pregnant if she is raped. Some fundamentalists cults even propagate the theory of telegony now in order to enforce chastity via scare tactics.


On the flip side for women, telegony meant that in the case of an affair, the legal rather than biological father was considered to have a higher claim over any illegitimate children his wife might mother, so the fact she was sleeping around was never that important anyway.

Most of the theory was explored through pre-Mendelian discovery genetic exploration of mating horses first with zebras and then with other horses to see whether the horse-horse offspring were stripey or resistant to African diseases (it varied). Even Darwin toyed with telegony, and was convinced by this kind of stripey foal evidence as late as 1868. This led to a lot of animal breeders becoming excessively worried about the “contamination” of their females, whose taste was seldom as pure-bred as that of her breeders.

In fact, it wasn't until statistician Karl Pearson pointed out that telegony also implied an increasing similarity between father and successive children belonging to the same mother that the discrepancies overwhelmed the coincidences and telegony actually, at least outside fundamental Christian circles, disappeared.

Posted by Rowena Fletcher-Wood on Jul 13, 2014 5:35 PM Europe/London

Past Posts

Share this |

Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linked More...

Leave a comment?

You must be signed in to leave a comment on MyRSC blogs.

Register free for an account at http://my.rsc.org/registration.