Animal breeding / by A.L. Hagedoorn.

  • Hagedoorn, Arend L. (Arend Lourens), 1880-1953.
Date:
[1939]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Animal breeding / by A.L. Hagedoorn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Chapter One The Rôle of the Geneticist in Animal Breeding T ■ he breeding of animals is based upon the fact that certain qualities of our domestic animals run in families. Breeders aim to work in such a way that the coming genera¬ tions of animals will be as good as, or better than, the pre¬ ceding generations. The continued presence of valuable qualities in strains of animals is due to the presence of inherited developmental fac¬ tors, which are passed on from parents to offspring. As the study of the transmittance of these substances is one of the main problems on which the geneticists are working, it is clear that this special knowledge of the geneticists may be of some value to the animal breeders. When we want to co-operate with the breeders of plants and animals, we geneticists have to remember just where our interest coincides with that of the breeders, and we must be clear as to the breeders' objective, and how we can help them to reach it. The aim of the animal breeders is to breed good, valuable or beautiful animals, and they must do this by manipulating the units in heredity, the genes. The breeders, however, are not interested in those genes as such. Years ago, when Genetics was a young science, some of us thought that the interests of breeders and geneticists largely coincided, that the co-operation between breeders and geneticists should be of great profit to both groups of workers. It is true that to a geneticist, interested in evolution problems, a thorough working knowledge of evolution in domestic ani¬ mals, in which changes are rapid, is very illuminating, and there may be one or two other points where a geneticist can learn by studying the work of the breeders. Where geneticists