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The Importance of Threshold Characters in Animal Breeding¹

University of Wisconsin

Abstract

It is not the object of this paper to present new facts or theories, but merely to emphasize certain well known genetic facts in their relation to animal breeding practice. I refer to the incidence of those characters which are often spoken of as feebly inherited, or irregularly inherited, or indeed as not being heritable at all. Now it is a truism that every character an organism possesses must have an hereditary base and that the final expression of the character is a resultant of the effects of the environment, in the broadest sense of the term, acting upon and determining the direction and degree of development of the hereditary potentiality. Reduced to terms of genes, this simply means that the effect any gene may have in producing an end result is dependent not only on its own intrinsic properties, but also on the nature of the other genes with which it is associated, and upon the whole complex of conditions which impinge upon it during development.

¹ Paper from the Department of Genetics, Agricultural Experiment Station, Univesity of Wisconsin, No. 223. Published with the approval of the Director of the Station.