A focus on the process rather than product

A few weeks back, many of us read the rather stunning case of an ant in the genus Messor from Sicily that produced two kinds of male offspring, one of them apparently of a completely different species! Given the number of eyebrows that such a finding raises, it is clear that this research took a good while before it was finally published! The complicated genetics was however not entirely unexpected. This made me wonder about the teaching of genetics in classrooms, the kind of finality and perfection that textbook concepts are made to appear like is perhaps a myth that teachers could do well to dispel early in life. Unfortunately it seems that teaching and testing in education is as fascist and authoritarian as the rest of the social environment. 

Some years ago, on a trip to Nandi Hills, I had the good fortune of being able to browse an old guest book. One of the comments that caught my attention was this one.

A little digging revealed that this was Spencer Wharton Brown, a geneticist who at that point did not even have a Wikipedia entry (of course that gap was fixed). He actually was so prominent in his time that he had the nickname "Mr Chromosome". It would appear that he must have been a visitor to the Indian Institute of Science - considering that some years later he did publish a paper with an Indian coauthor - Chandra, H. Sharat; Brown, Spencer W. (1975). "Chromosome imprinting and the mammalian X chromosome". Nature. 253 (5488). My friend Karthik Ramaswamy, then at the Archives of the IISc (now no longer an extant function!), tried to examine this a bit more.

Now Brown apparently decided to use scale insects as his model for genetics studies and was it a good choice?! In scale insects, there appears to be such stuff as post zygotic deletion of the male genome!  Sadly, Spencer Brown was murdered somewhat mysteriously!

Anyway, the lesson here seems to be that the whole system of genetic control including the influence of peptides (maternal environment), silencing RNA, epigenetics, Lamarckism, etc. calls for a more cautious approach to the teaching of biology in general. But looking at these findings should make one appreciate gene-centric views of evolution.  

• Brown, S.W. (1963) The Comstockiella system of chromosome behavior in the armored scale insects (Coccoidea:Diaspididae). Chromosoma 14:360–406. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00326785 
• Brown, Spencer W., and Giovanni DeLotto. (1950) Cytology and sex ratios of an African species of armored scale insect (Coccoidea-Diaspididae). The American Naturalist 93.873: 369-379. 
• Brown, Spencer W. (1960) Spontaneous chromosome fragmentation in the armored scale insects (Coccoïdea‐Diaspididae). Journal of Morphology 106.2: 159-185. 
• Hartl, Daniel L., and Spencer W. Brown (1970) The origin of male haploid genetic systems and their expected sex ratio. Theoretical Population Biology 1.2:165-190. 
• Ross, Laura, Ido Pen, and David M. Shuker (2010) Genomic conflict in scale insects: the causes and consequences of bizarre genetic systems. Biological Reviews 85.4:807-828.