Donation and Acceptance in Biological Inheritance: The Long Path from Darwin’s Gemmules, DNA and Membranes to Uniqueness and Kinship

Abstract

The inheritance of features within plants, animals and men as species as well as individuals represents one of the oldest concepts of thinking about biological phenomena of mankind. From the beginning, it has been linked to the transfer, i.e. donation acceptance, of some materials from the mother organism or parents to the daughter organism or children, respectively. Despite some speculations about the mechanistic basis of inheritance, which cumulated in the formulation of the “Pangenesis” theory with “Gemmules” operating as matter of inheritance by Charles Darwin, the nature of the matter of biological inheritance remained obscure until the seminal finding of bacterial transformation by Frederick Griffith in 1928 and the subsequent identification of the transforming principle as DNA by Avery, McCarthy and MacLeod in 1944. This turned out as the starting point for a series of key findings of molecular biology, such as the deciphering of the genetic code, which finally gave rise to its central dogma with fundamental consequences for life science and society, such as the exclusion of the possibility of the inheritance of acquired traits. From then on at the latest, inheritance has been intimately linked to DNA as the mediator or carrier material for genetic processes which is both necessary and sufficient for the synthesis of proteins and as consequence of the DNA-centric view of inheritance for the self-assembly of cellular structures as well as the development of the complete organism. Here, some of the most influential settings and presumptions of this view will be delineated in concert with the resulting exclusion of other biological matter, such as membranes and organelles, and concomitantly of the process of self-organization and autopoiesis from biological inheritance.

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