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Anecdotal, Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics MORGAN’S Hypothesis of the Genetic Control of Development

A NY student of genetics who has read STURTEVANT’S classical paper of 19 13, “The linear arrangement of six sex-linked factors in Drosophila, as shown by their mode of association,” must have been puzzled by the odd terminology that he used for the wing mutants miniature and rudimentary: “The normal wing is RM. The r M wing is known as miniature, the Rm as rudimentary, and the rm as rudimentaryminiature” (STURTEVANT 191 3). Why did he confuse the notation, assigning to the miniature phenotype the mutant gene r and to the rudimentary phenotype the mutant gene m, rather than the other way around, as is customary nowadays? The terminology was also used by MORGAN, as in the paper in which he examined the results of crosses between the two sex-linked traits miniature and rudimentary (MORGAN 191 2). A careful reading of the paper reveals that this oddity actually expressed a sophisticated hypothesis of gene action in the embryological development of Drosophila. MORGAN was very conscious of the epistomological importance of the notation that he used to describe his experimental results. Thus, in his first Mendelian paper, where he reported his breeding results with the white-eyed mutant of Drosophila, he initially suggested the assumption “that all of the spermatozoa of the white-eyed male carried the single ‘factor’ for white eyes ‘W’ [and] all of the eggs of the red-eyed females carry  the  red-eyed  ‘factor,’  R” (MORGAN 19 10, p. 120), rather than the more common convention that had been introduced by MENDEL, R for red eyes and r for white eyes. That this was not a frivolous act, but rather indicated MORGAN’S awareness that white eye-color was not the only genetically determined alternative to red eye-color, is obvious from his other papers at that time (e .g . , MORGAN 19 12, 19 134, in which he noted that the problem had not existed for MENDEL “for none of his paired characters involved two changes in kind in the same organ” (MOR-