PERMANENCE UNEXPLAINABLE BY CLASSICAL PHYSICS

Thus, aided by the marvellously subtle instrument of X-rays (which, as the physicist remembers, revealed thirty years ago the detailed atomic lattice structures of crystals), the united efforts of biologists and physicists have of late succeeded in reducing the upper limit for the size of the microscopic structure, being responsible for a definite large-scale feature of the individual - the ‘size of a gene’ - and reducing it far below the estimates obtained on pp. 29-30. We are now seriously faced with the question: How can we, from the point of view of statistical physics, reconcile the facts that the gene structure seems to involve only a comparatively small number of atoms (of the order of 1,000 and possibly much less), and that nevertheless it displays a most regular and lawful activity — with a durability or permanence that borders upon the miraculous?

Let me throw the truly amazing situation into relief once again. Several members of the Habsburg dynasty have a peculiar disfigurement of the lower lip (‘Habsburger Lippe’). Its inheritance has been studied carefully and published, complete with historical portraits, by the Imperial Academy of Vienna, under the auspices of the family. The feature proves to be a genuinely MendeIian ‘allele’ to the normal form of the lip.