We are talking about an old theory by the German biologist August Weismann called “telegony” based on the transmission of inheritance, which postulated that the lineage of a female and a male could acquire physical qualities from another male who had previously mated with the female (idea already exposed previously by Aristotle).
This approach based on impregnation and non-genetic inheritance, which was later scientifically banished, has just been demonstrated in flies , as published in the journal Ecology Letters .
A team of Australian scientists led by Angela Crean conducted an experiment with flies, crossing immature insects with large and small males. Once they were fertile, they crossed the females again, discovering that “although the second male fathered the offspring, the size of the progeny was determined by that of the mother’s previous sexual partner. This finding shows that some acquired traits can also be transmitted to the offspring of later pairs of a female, ”says Crean, leader of the study.
According to the study, Weismann’s theory was not so far-fetched , since the “first impregnation” is more likely to influence the female than the later ones : first, because she is younger and second, because the later ones would have to share their “influence. ”With the previous ones. This would explain why, for example, the children of a second marriage or a second couple may resemble those of the first couple, showing such striking characteristics as red hair, their current parents being brown.
By transferring the experiment from flies to humans, the ability of sperm RNA could also reach immature eggs causing this “impregnation” and therefore be present in a subsequent pregnancy, causing genetic rearrangements that would vary the expression of genes.
” We can imagine that during intercourse millions of DNA-containing sperm are deposited in the female’s body and those that are not used in fertilization are absorbed by it . If this foreign DNA is incorporated into somatic cells and immature eggs, the offspring could show this influence on their genetic makeup, and thus provide another basis for telegony, “says researcher Yongsheng Liu in this regard in a recent article published in Gene magazine.
