Scientists are far less rigorous about the use of language than about
their results. It is not uncommon for some to use the word "gene" when
they mean "cistron", but that creates confusion with older uses.
> I wasn't familiar with Mandel. Thanks again.
Did I spell that wrong? I was talking about Gregor Mendel, the monk
who is credited with discovering the whole field of genetics by counting
pea plants (and faking his numbers, but we didn't discover that until
much later).
> >their alleles in the gene pool to produce selection; individual cistrons
> >do not compete in this way, so they aren't "genes".
>
> Except (apparently) for plants......interesting.
> I feel myself slipping into a new paradigm.
I don't think most plants have any special facilities for keeping
cistrons together any more than humans do, nor any special means of
separating phenotypic effects by them. Perhaps they are just simpler
in general, so one is more likely to find easy cases to deal with.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>