For those unfamiliar, Wikipedia describes telegony as “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.” To put it in our current jargon, this would mean, for example, that a chimney sweep might still bring forth coal, or that your QT3.14AZNGF might still have a hapa-like child after she’s left you. Thus telegony is a question of no small importance to the sensitive young man. If telegony is real, the practice of being choosy about women based on their past partners gains a point of great vindication.
Now, not only does the article begin by calling telegony by that wonderfully unmeaningful word, pseudoscientific, it also plays a familiar game of the fact-checkers and truth-determiners when it goes on to say that “While no scientific evidence exists of any true telegenetic mechanism of inheritance...” and then provides a link to a study which, in fact, provides scientific evidence of a telegenetic method of inheritance. That study is titled Revisiting telegony: offspring inherit an acquired characteristic of their mother's previous mate, and while it may be more tempting to examine why these Wikipedia-editor-types love to make their boldest claims right next to the most obvious contradictions, let us instead examine the study.
Understanding this study requires first understanding a previous study evidently led by the same scholar in both cases: Russell Bonduriansky. Mr. Bonduriansky’s previous study found that in an Australian species of fly called Telostylinus Angusticollis (he and others have conducted many studies and experiments on this particular type and its reproduction) males that were reared on a rich diet would have larger offspring, and males that were reared on a poor diet would have smaller offspring. This means that some non-genetic traits of the father are heritable.This finding has large implications: those inclined to think their good genes guarantee them good children should take note. But those implications are outside the scope of our main study—it is enough to understand that the size of offspring, based on the quality of diet of the father when in development, is the characteristic being examined in the Revisiting telegony study.
Having found non-genetic inheritance, Mr. Boduriansky and Angela J. Crean then found a way to test for telegony. They kept females segregated from males until they were one week old, then allowed each to copulate with a male that had been fed a diet to produce either large offspring or small (called high condition and low condition in the text). At one week old, the females are not yet fertile, and so the males’ seminal fluids can be expected to permeate the tissue around the eggs without causing conception. After copulation, the females were separated again for another two weeks. At 3 weeks old, now fertile, they were allowed to copulate with a male. All possible mate combinations were tried (low, low; low, high; high, low; high, high).The offspring were later measured, and their genes were studied against the males’ to determine whether they were, in fact, the second male’s children. The finding was this: the first male determined the size of the children far more than the children’s actual father did. A variation on the experiment was done in which the first males were either allowed no physical contact, contact but not mating, or outright mating. Though I am inclined to pause and wonder how exactly one prevents flies from mating when they’re together, the important things is that this was done to isolate the exact method of the first male’s effect; these flies have previously been shown to be influenced by “social” factors and perhaps that is what was at play here. Was it just the fact of being around the chad gigafly that made the females bring forth bigger offspring?
