pangenesis
Noun
Meaning
An hypothesis advanced by Darwin in explanation of heredity.
Source: Webster's dictionarySynonyms
Antonyms
Examples
Darwin wrote that Hippocrates' pangenesis was "almost identical with mine—merely a change of terms—and an application of them to classes of facts necessarily unknown to the old philosopher."
Hugo de Vries connected Darwin's pangenesis theory to Weismann's germ/soma cell distinction and proposed that Darwin's pangenes were concentrated in the cell nucleus and when expressed they could move into the cytoplasm to change the cells structure.
University of Chicago Press. p. 86. ISBN 0-226-36051-2 "As Darwin was to discover many years later, Buffon had devised a system of heredity not all that different from his own theory of pangenesis."
The Irish physician Henry Freke in his book Origin of Species by Means of Organic Affinity (1861) developed a variant of pangenesis.