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From Chronogenetics to Phenogenesis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Luigi Gedda*
Affiliation:
The Gregor Mendel Institute of Medical Genetics and Twin Studies, Rome, Italy
*
Istituto Mendel, Piazza Galeno 5, 00161 Roma, Italy

Extract

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Allow me to start by observing that, in the word “reproduction”, the initial syllable, Re, has a remarkable importance, at least to the geneticist. In fact, when we say “reproduction”, we do not merely mean that a living being is produced, but we also mean that the production of such a living being implies the repetition of a model that is present in the species, in the population, in the family.

Moreover, the model that is reproduced is not only that of an embryo, of a fetus, of a neonate, but is also that of a child, of an adolescent, of an adult, of an old man.

Reproduction is therefore the repetition of a model that is not limited to the amphimixis, to gestation or birth, but that dominates throughout the entire cycle of life with a continuous variability, that is, through a dynamic and individualized phenogenesis. Such an extension of the concept of reproduction from the stage of conception to the standards of the successive ages, requires that a view based on immediate times be substituted with a view based on long times. This means, in other words, that a new parameter should be explicitly considered as part of the zygote's blueprint: the chronologic parameter.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Twin Studies 1977

Footnotes

*

Text of a lecture for the Second International Congress on Human Reproduction, Tel Aviv: 23-28 October 1977.

References

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