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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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He was close with the "seeds" parents pass onto their children (not knowing what genes or DNA were, or course), but he should have been able to empirically figure out that this was incorrect:
Because sometimes children can look like their grandparent more than a parent, meaning the "seeds" are there, just latent.
You mean like the first few lines of what I quoted where he talks about how traits from grandparents or great grandparents can come back?
Oh yeah, totally forgot that. In that case, it's even more puzzling that he would claim the child inherited more "seed" from one parent than the other based on their apperance.
I think his idea includes things like "if the kid looks like the maternal grandfather, more contribution was from the mother's seed than the father's."
Not that it's exclusively that the contributions are only dependent on how closely matching the appearance of the mother or father and only the mother or father.
But sometimes a kid can look more like their mother, and that kid's kid can look more like their paternal grandfather. How would he explain that?
That the kid's kid got more of the dad's seed in the "shifting lottery."
It's not like he's saying a kid that looks like the mother isn't getting any contribution from the father.
And while he's technically wrong in the idea that there's a disproportionate overall contribution from each parent, it is true that genes and traits responsible for physical appearance can be disproportionately passed on.