Telegony (inheritance)

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Telegony is a pseudoscientific theory of heredity holding that offspring can inherit the characteristics of a previous mate of the female parent; thus the child of a woman might partake of traits of a previous sexual partner. Experiments in the late 19th century on several species failed to provide evidence that offspring would inherit any character from their mother's previous mates. It was superseded by the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance and the Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory. Although no evidence exists of any true telegenetic mechanism of inheritance, a similar phenomenon whereby environmental (non-genetic) traits of a prior mate affected the development of a subsequent mate's offspring was recently discovered in a species of fly.

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