REVELATIONS IN SCIENCE: Lord Morton’s Mare and the Role of the First Male
Art Design: huxley.media via Photoshop, inspired by René Magritte’s painting Portrait of Steffi Langui, 1961
THE DEATH OF ODYSSEUS
The Odyssey concludes with the triumph of its hero, his return to his homeland, his royal crown, and his beloved wife. However, the circumstances of Odysseus’s death remain unaddressed in the epic. In the popular retelling of myths by Kuhn, this ending is elaborated: Odysseus, like many folk heroes, meets his end at the hand of his son, who, unaware of his father’s identity, strikes him with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray.
Evagoras of Cyrene, a continuator of Homer’s stories, provides further details, telling us that this son was born to Circe, with whom Odysseus spent seven years in captivity. It is said that later, the son repented, cleansed himself of his sin, and married his stepmother, Penelope, the widow of Odysseus. His name was Telegonus, meaning «born far away».
LORD MORTON’S MARE
Perhaps it was this ancient hero that August Weismann, one of the founders of the contentious Weismannism-Morganism theory that troubled the Soviet academician, Trofim Lysenko, recalled when he sought a name for a new scientific concept. This theory emerged with the direct involvement of Charles Darwin, who shared with the scientific world the story of a remarkable thoroughbred mare owned by British Lord Morton.
Lord Morton told Darwin about his extraordinary mare, which was seven-eighths Arabian and one-eighth English, who had, through an oversight, been allowed to mate with a male quagga, a wild relative of the zebra (now extinct, as ill-fated hunters wiped out all quaggas).
This initial mating did not produce any offspring, but later, no matter which purebred stallions were paired with this mare, foals were born showing quagga traits — either a coarse coat or a dark stripe along the spine, as if they were still somehow part quagga.
Darwin didn’t argue with Lord Morton but didn’t view the case as especially significant either — who knew what might be lurking in the mare’s ancestry? Yet, the French biologist Félix-Alexandre Le Dantec drew far-reaching conclusions from this story.
According to his theory, the first stallion (or rather, the male quagga) that the mare encountered didn’t produce offspring but still left some kind of mysterious essence in her body. As a result, all her foals inherited certain quagga traits despite the fact that their biological fathers had no connection to quaggas whatsoever.
THUS A NEW SCIENCE WAS BORN
This implied that the first intimate partner (not only for horses — why not cows, lionesses, or even women?) could influence the traits of all of a female’s offspring, regardless of their fathers, who might know nothing about him, bear no resemblance to him, and have no connection to him whatsoever!
To name this so-called scientific theory, Le Dantec and his followers borrowed a term coined by August Weismann, drawn from the name of Odysseus’s ill-fated son, who killed his father and married his stepmother — the term telegony, which, in the familiar Greek language of science, means «distant birth».
However, it would be inaccurate to credit Le Dantec with the theory’s origin; the great scholar Aristotle, during the lifetime of Alexander the Great, whom he taught, proposed that any being (human, animal, or even plant) inherits traits not only from its parents but also from all male beings with whom the mother has had intimate relations.
Moreover, this theory has not been believed only by scientists; many breeders of dogs, cats, pigeons, and other domestic animals continue to support it, even today. As practitioners, they observe these patterns firsthand, while scientists may try to convince them that there are a thousand plausible explanations for such occurrences. This simply brings them peace of mind. Not to mention Aristotle, who taught that the brain was only necessary for producing mucus, which he believed was its sole function.
However, scientists are a thorough bunch; it isn’t enough to declare a theory — they must prove or, at the very least, refute it. How, then, could one make sense of Lord Morton’s mare? All we have are Darwin’s words recounting the lord’s story, with the mare long gone (her case dating back to 1815, shortly after Waterloo) and the quaggas extinct beyond any chance of study.
VERIFICATION
Nevertheless, Scottish zoologist James Cossar Ewart, who was crossbreeding horses and zebras (the closest relatives of quaggas) to develop a new breed of draft animals for African farmers that would be more resistant to local diseases and more resilient overall, decided to test whether the phenomenon of telegony would appear in the offspring of horses initially mated with zebras, followed by mating with regular stallions.
Ewart was a skilled experimenter, and he had ample test animals, allowing him to make solid and reliable conclusions. He did just that, and his findings regarding telegony were utterly negative. The foals born to mares initially mated with zebras, then subsequently mated with ordinary horses, resembled zebras no more than foals from other mares that had never been near zebras. Stripes could appear on foals’ coats, but whether their mothers’ first mates were zebras or not had no bearing on the phenomenon — these were simply atavisms.
Other scientists conducted meticulous, multi-year studies on various animals, Lang with dogs and Belle with pigeons, yet the results were identical. Any resemblance in the offspring was only to their biological fathers, not to the mothers’ first partners. There was no manifestation of telegony as if it simply didn’t exist. Perhaps it really doesn’t?
BUT ISN’T IT BETTER THIS WAY?
There was another complication — the presence of people who, in principle, didn’t care whether telegony was supported or refuted by facts. They simply liked telegony; it fit neatly into their preferred worldview, and if the facts contradicted it, so much the worse for the facts.
For instance, the German Nazis quickly embraced telegony — it offered an excellent rationale for the notion that cunning Jews could spread their «terrible» race everywhere. If a Jewish man seduced an Aryan virgin, then any children she later bore to Aryan husbands would supposedly carry Jewish traits. Why bother testing such a helpful theory? If it didn’t hold up, imagine how disappointing that would be!
Telegony also found supporters in the USSR during the 1930s. Since Trofim Lysenko had little regard for genetics — and genetics categorically denied telegony — supporters of so-called «Michurinist agrobiology» were quick to celebrate telegony, even though the term itself had been coined by Weismann, whose name inspired the Lysenkoists’ favorite slur, «Weismannism-Morganism». But who cares who names a good idea? Interestingly, telegony’s popularity in Germany declined sharply after Adolf Hitler’s death and in the USSR after Joseph Stalin’s death. A curious coincidence, isn’t it?
UNEXPECTED CONCLUSIONS
Even today, telegony advocates occasionally claim the theory is valid, emphasizing that it promotes morality by encouraging women to marry as virgins. Curiously, they rarely suggest that men should abstain from premarital sex. But that’s not the main issue here.
The question is whether they realize that if telegony were real, it would encourage a completely different model of behavior. If telegony were true, then all women would seek to lose their virginity as quickly as possible to the most attractive, strong, intelligent, and healthy man they could find so that all future children would resemble him — rendering the choice of husband irrelevant.
This would, in fact, have the opposite effect on traditional morality, making premarital sex fashionable and highly advisable. The ones who would suffer most under such a model would be beautiful men, who would find themselves hunted, lured, even coerced, though it’s admittedly more challenging to do so with men than women… and what’s worse, these feats would be in vain, as there is no telegony, and every experiment testing this hypothesis has produced the same result.
NEWS FROM AUSTRALIA
«Aha!» some may say. «Not everyone agrees!» In 2013, Australian researchers published results from their studies on Telostylinus angusticollis flies. Some male flies were overfed, which made them grow more extensive, and then females were mated first with these larger males and later with ordinary ones. Offspring from the ordinary males reportedly grew somewhat more significant, too. Telegony?
It seems this conclusion might be premature — overfeeding has little effect on genetics, and weight gain is a non-heritable, acquired trait that isn’t clearly passed down. By the same logic, one could label as telegony a case in which a woman infected with HIV gives birth to an HIV-positive child from another man. Yet, this sad phenomenon can be explained more naturally without invoking telegony.
Interestingly, we haven’t seen follow-up experiments to confirm or refute these findings. It seems that no one has managed to obtain significant results so far, which in itself is telling. Science is generally reluctant to make absolute judgments, and changing an established scientific worldview isn’t easy. Nor should we rush it.
CONCLUSIONS
For now, let’s leave telegony to Telegonus’s contemporaries — back then, people believed in many things, some of which later fell away as facts emerged. It’s entirely possible that Lord Morton wasn’t misleading Darwin and that his thoroughbred mare’s case was as he described it. Darwin himself wasn’t amazed, as he was well aware of atavisms, where resemblance to distant ancestors can suddenly appear.
And if there’s one thing we definitely shouldn’t do, it’s to align our worldview with morality or religion instead of facts. People invent the former, while facts are simply observed and cannot be altered — only misrepresented.
LITERATURE
- Kurilo, L. F. Where do little black babies come from, or what is telegony? // Ogonyok. 1995. — №29 (4408). — pp. 42–44.
- Le Dantec, Félix. Évolution individuelle et hérédité: théorie de la variation quantitative. — 1st ed. — Paris: Éditions Félix Alcan, 1898. — 343 p.
