Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, 1011 E. 3rd St.,Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2010 Dec 15;314(8):616-24. doi: 10.1002/jez.b.21374.
In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Vargas presents a new, epigenetic explanation of Paul Kammerer's controversial midwife toad experiments, but he has constructed his model without first reading Kammerer's original articles. A look at the articles shows that Vargas is seriously misinformed about what Kammerer did and what the results even were. His model simply cannot explain the results as they were originally reported and it cannot easily be corrected. Similarly, Vargas' historical inferences about the Kammerer affair, Kammerer's priority for the discovery of parent-of-origin effects, and the negative reactions of geneticists to this purported discovery, are unsupported and do not stand up to scrutiny.
在最近的一篇期刊文章中,亚历山大·巴尔加斯(Alexander Vargas)提出了一种新的、基于表观遗传学的解释,用于说明保罗·卡默勒(Paul Kammerer)备受争议的助产蟾蜍实验,但他在构建模型时并未首先阅读卡默勒的原始论文。仔细阅读这些论文就会发现,巴尔加斯对卡默勒的所作所为以及实验结果的了解严重有误。他的模型根本无法解释最初报告的实验结果,而且也不容易进行修正。同样,巴尔加斯对卡默勒事件的历史推断、卡默勒对亲本来源效应发现的优先权,以及遗传学家对这一所谓发现的负面反应,都没有得到证实,也经不起推敲。