Ancestral Tree Research Articles

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD AND THE QURAN

Based on an independent analysis of artifacts, ancestral tree and astronomical phenomena related to the deeds, life and death of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as historical evidence of the first appearance and legal use of the Quran in the life of Muslims, the author drew conclusions about the integration of several historical figures of the VII and XII centuries into the personality of the Prophet Muhammad. They became Khagan Kubrat, aka Emperor Heraclius, the Arabian Prophet or Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphs and the true Prophet Muhammad, who lived in 1090–1052. The Quran was created in 1130–1152. The proposed interpretation does not undermine the canons of the faith of Islam, but establishes the truth.

Mapping the genealogy of medical device predicates in the United States.

In the United States, medical devices are regulated and subject to review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before they can be marketed. Low-to-medium risk novel medical devices can be reviewed under the De Novo umbrella before they can proceed to market, and this process can be fairly cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming. An alternate faster and less-expensive pathway to going to market is the 510(k) pathway. In this approach, if the device can be shown to be substantially equivalent in safety and effectiveness to a pre-existing FDA-approved marketed device (or "predicates"), it can be cleared to market. Due to the possibility of daisy-chaining predicate devices, it can very quickly be difficult to unravel the logic and justification of how a particular medical device's equivalence was established. From patients' perspective, this minimizes transparency in the process. From a vendor perspective, it can be difficult to determine the right predicate that applies to their device. We map the connectivity of various predicates in the medical device field by applying text mining and natural language processing (NLP) techniques on data publicly made available by the FDA 78000 device summaries were scraped from the US FDA 510(k) database, and a total of 2,721 devices cleared by the 510(k) regulatory pathway in 2020 were used as a specific case study to map the genealogy of medical devices cleared by the FDA. Cosine similarity was used to gauge the degree of substantial equivalence between two medical devices by evaluating their device descriptions and indications for use. Recalls and complaints for predicate devices were extracted from the FDA's Total Product Life Cycle database using html scraping and web page optical character recognition to determine the similarity between class 1 recalled devices (the most severe form of device recall) and other substantially equivalent devices. A specific product code was used to illustrate the mapping of the genealogy from a De Novo device. The ancestral tree for the medical devices cleared in 2020 is vast and sparse, with a large number of devices having only 1-2 predicates. Evaluation of substantial equivalence data from 2003-2020 shows that the standard for substantial equivalence has not changed significantly. Studying the recalls and complaints, shows that the insulin infusion pump had the highest number of complaints, yet none of the recalled devices bore significant degree of text similarity to currently marketed devices. The mapping from the De Novo device case study was used to develop an ancestry map from the recalled predicate (recalled due to design flaws) to current substantially equivalent products in the market. Besides enabling a better understanding of the risks and benefits of the 510(k) process, mapping of connectivity of various predicates could help increase consumer confidence in the medical devices that are currently in the marketplace.

DATING THE NEW TESTAMENT

Based on a thorough analysis of the chronicles of Ancient and New Rome, Ancient Russia, Great Bulgaria and Arabic sources, as well as the texts of the Gospels, the author made a reconstruction of the ancestral tree of Jesus Christ and the events of the New Testament, linking them to real historical figures and astronomical phenomena. In addition, the author compares the facts of the appearance of the canonical image of Jesus Christ on icons, mosaics and frescoes, the Holy Shroud, and coins of ancient states. The author justifies the dating of the events of the New Testament to the beginning of the XI century on the basis of established facts, and not the generally accepted canons of faith.

ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ ВОЗРАСТНЫХ ИНИЦИАЦИОННЫХ ОБРЯДОВ И АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ИГРЫ В КУЛЬТУРЕ ТУНГУСО-МАНЬЧЖУРОВ

The article considers the mental characteristics of the initiation features in the artistic and game culture of the Tungus-Manchus for the first time. In the ritual vocabulary of some Tungus-Manchu peoples (Nanai and Udege), words associated with the initiatory period of age - the first youth hunt and the birth of the first child by a woman - have been preserved. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, they had rituals of gifting young men with hunting tools and military equipment. The rituals were accompanied by holidays and the hunting ones survived until the end of the 20th century. When girls attained the marriage age, they were supposed to wear a special headdress: the Nanai people have the image of the ancestral tree of life, the Evenks have the image of the sun as the giver of the souls of children. During this period, the girl's mother gave her a needle for embroidery and ornamentation of clothing and utensils. The initial rituals were preserved as separate elements in the games and ornamentation of clothing, utensils and dolls among the Tungus-Manchus...

Visualizing Human Colorectal Cancer Intratumor Heterogeneity with Phylogeography.

Phylogeography combines ancestry with location and can be translated to intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) to visualize how tumors spread. ITH is common in human tumors, with many genetic and phenotypic differences between regions. The roles of ITH in progression are uncertain because many subclones lack discernable driver mutations. ITH can be visualized by mapping mutations onto microscopic sections, where subclones are directly associated with phenotypes, especially the deeper areas with the more invasive cells that confer worst clinical outcomes. Instead of a stepwise hierarchy where subclones segregate by phenotype with later branching subclones in more invasive areas, multiple subclones share superficial and invasive phenotype and are jigsaw arrayed in vertical columns. Phylogeography shows that both early and late subclones extend from the surface to the invasive front, suggesting that founder cells start with phenotypic plasticity and essentially all the drivers necessary to rapidly grow into large invasive tumors.

The coalescent structure of continuous-time Galton–Watson trees

Take a continuous-time Galton–Watson tree. If the system survives until a large time $T$, then choose $k$ particles uniformly from those alive. What does the ancestral tree drawn out by these $k$ particles look like? Some special cases are known but we give a more complete answer. We concentrate on near-critical cases where the mean number of offspring is $1+\mu/T$ for some $\mu\in\mathbb{R}$, and show that a scaling limit exists as $T\to\infty$. Viewed backwards in time, the resulting coalescent process is topologically equivalent to Kingman’s coalescent, but the times of coalescence have an interesting and highly nontrivial structure. The randomly fluctuating population size, as opposed to constant size populations where the Kingman coalescent more usually arises, have a pronounced effect on both the results and the method of proof required. We give explicit formulas for the distribution of the coalescent times, as well as a construction of the genealogical tree involving a mixture of independent and identically distributed random variables. In general subcritical and supercritical cases it is not possible to give such explicit formulas, but we highlight the special case of birth–death processes.

The nested Kingman coalescent: Speed of coming down from infinity

Author(s): Blancas, Airam; Rogers, Tim; Schweinsberg, Jason; Siri-Jegousso, Arno | Abstract: The nested Kingman coalescent describes the ancestral tree of a population undergoing neutral evolution at the level of individuals and at the level of species, simultaneously. We study the speed at which the number of lineages descends from infinity in this hierarchical coalescent process and prove the existence of an early-time phase during which the number of lineages at time $t$ decays as $ 2\gamma/ct^2$, where $c$ is the ratio of the coalescence rates at the individual and species levels, and the constant $\gamma\approx 3.45$ is derived from a recursive distributional equation for the number of lineages contained within a species at a typical time.

Effects of kept secrets

Reviewed by: Road to Tamarlin by K. M. Steele Summer Dorr Effects of kept secrets K. M. Steele. Road to Tamarlin. Brisbane: Campbell St Press, 2017. 280 pp. A$15.75. ISBN 978-0-6481214-0-4 K. M. Steele's Road to Tamarlin could be labeled both a mystery and a coming-of-age story, as, in a matter of hours, two teenage girls are chased out of a cave, their mother goes missing, and their father is implicated in the disappearance. One minute these young women play dress-up in their moth-er's clothing, and the next they worry about being assaulted by a stranger before they say goodnight to a parent for the last time. This novel does not so much use its pages to reveal the effects of grief or investigative concern but rather chronicles the cause and effect of incomplete stories, how with-holding information allows for suspicion to linger, anger to fester, and estrangement to become permanent. Sectioned off into months/years (e.g., the book begins in "December, 1975" and ends in "February, 2007"), this novel, for the most part—until a man named Lou Roberts shows up for the story's last portion—tracks two sisters, Nancy and Mary Slender. Their father, Lionel, is a traditionalist, wanting to tame his thousands of acres in the known, familiar, way, which is an inclination that his stepdaughter, Nancy, adopts (to the eventual detriment of her down-the-road marriage); Nancy also subscribes to Lionel's distorted biblical interpretations. Mary, meanwhile, believes her father culpable for their mother's absence—maybe he even [End Page 176] murdered her—and resents Nancy's devo-tion to such a man. Mary, eventually dis-respectful to the point that she is asked to leave Tamarlin, goes to her grandmother's and, later, to Sydney. The sisters, already dif-ferent in temperament before their mother's leaving, become more dissimilar as their paths dichotomize. Mary later tells Lou, "But someone had to stay; a sacrifice to the land, so to speak. I guess we always knew it would be Nancy" (202). There is not enough question-asking among this central family with regard to the palpable tension relating to religion, a missing mother, and their owned land. The Slenders accuse, ignore, or opt to agree or disagree with rumors without research. Research is not something Lionel or Nancy want when options come to modernize the farm. Nor is it something Nancy needs when she hears town gossip: that their mother, Tamara, ran off with her lover (husband of a local woman). Mary becomes a journalist later in life and makes a habit of surveying public spaces for a possible mother sighting yet, ironically, in this career makes no seri-ous attempt to uncover her mother's where-abouts or discover whether Tamara has been alive since that last evening she was seen. For the book's latter portion, Lou—who is related to the man who chased the girls away from the Limeholes—asks questions about his family, and only through his curi-osity (in his efforts to complete his ancestral tree) are the secrets surrounding Tamara Slender's absence exposed. The reader wonders why an outsider, with minimal vested interest in decades-old news, does the probing that Nancy and Mary do not. And, still, why, at any point, will Lionel not be candid with what he knows? Along with the epiphanies at the book's end, there is conveniently timed evidence that is literally unearthed. This book has its positives: it has unex-pected inclusions, a lack of predictability, and magical realism (e.g., Tamara apparitions), yet, as the last chapter shows, there are labor-saving shortcuts. That is, along with the not-so-satisfying conclusion, there are characters throughout the work that feel too thin, used more as speaking props than explained peo-ple. There are also sporadic Christian refer-ences (scriptures) and Aboriginal Australians mentioned (alluding to racial division) that, as placed, jar—as they are neither subtle nor sufficiently fleshed out to fit the narrative they are in. For example, after a couple of pages (60– 62) focused on race distinctions, including a...

Sylvan Memories of People, Place, and Trees in Nangodi, Northeastern Ghana

AbstractPeople's relationships with trees reflect the landscape histories associated with distinctive forms of political and religious authority and the moral imaginings of people in Nangodi and its environs in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Their memories of particular trees serve as historical evidence of overlapping yet specific forms of political authority exercised by chiefs, earth priests, past colonial officers, and present-day Ghanaian government officials. In Nangodi, individual family ancestral tree shrines, clan tree cemeteries, and sacred groves associated with earth priests and chiefs coexist with the Red Volta West Forest Reserve and with a succession of tree-related development initiatives. While these relationships are often considered as separate claims to political authority, spiritual power, or scientific knowledge, this paper argues that these relationships of people and of trees are better conceptualized as historical accumulations that represent intersecting and contested forms of authority and political rule continuing into the present. Indigenous tree species such as ebony are associated with sacred groves controlled by chiefs, silk-cotton trees with earth priests’ cemeteries, and baobab trees with particular families coexist with foreign teak trees associated with colonial forestry. This situation suggests how institutions of governance as well as the actions of individuals have environmental consequences. A consideration of historical memories of people and trees in places such as Nangodi enables a rethinking of political and environmental dichotomies, and complicates the social dynamics of` the preservation and destruction of trees and forests around the world.

Live phylogeny with polytomies: Finding the most compact parsimonious trees

Construction of phylogenetic trees has traditionally focused on binary trees where all species appear on leaves, a problem for which numerous efficient solutions have been developed. Certain application domains though, such as viral evolution and transmission, paleontology, linguistics, and phylogenetic stemmatics, often require phylogeny inference that involves placing input species on ancestral tree nodes (live phylogeny), and polytomies. These requirements, despite their prevalence, lead to computationally harder algorithmic solutions and have been sparsely examined in the literature to date. In this article we prove some unique properties of most parsimonious live phylogenetic trees with polytomies, and their mapping to traditional binary phylogenetic trees. We show that our problem reduces to finding the most compact parsimonious tree for n species, and describe a novel efficient algorithm to find such trees without resorting to exhaustive enumeration of all possible tree topologies.

Genetic Modeling of Human History Part 2: A Unique Origin Algorithm

This paper presents a mathematical unique origin model of humanity. It suggests algorithms for testing different historical scenarios of the human population under the assumption that we all descend from one single couple. For each such scenario, DNA variation is repeatedly simulated from a sample of individuals of today in order to estimate statistics of DNA variation. Comparison of these statistics to real data makes model validation possible. Each simulation repeat is divided into three steps, where first the genealogy of the sampled individuals is simulated backwards in time until the founder generation is reached, then founder DNA is generated and thereafter spread forwards in time to the present, along the lineages of the ancestral tree. The model is applicable to predefined demographic scenarios that may include population expansions and bottlenecks. Colonization/range expansion and geographic migration is achieved by dividing the metapopulation into geographically separated, but more or less connected, subpopulations. Age structure is modeled in terms of overlapping generations, with various mating rules for males and females and reproduction rules of mating couples. On the genetic level, our model incorporates mitochondrial as well as nuclear (autosomal, X and Y chromosomal) DNA, ordinary (reciprocal) recombination events and gene conversion. The source of genetic variation is selectively neutral germline mutations, and for autosomal and X chromosomal DNA, a second source of variation is created diversity. An extension of the model allows for balancing selection. It combines forward and backward simulation of the genealogy. Our paper is a first step towards a future goal to compare a best fitting unique origin model with a common descent model where humans and other species have a shared ancestry.

Microsatellite analysis of clonality and individual heterozygosity in natural populations of aspen Populus tremula L.: Identification of highly heterozygous clone

Aspen Populus tremula L. (Salicaceae) is the fast-growing tree species of environmental and economic value. Aspen is capable of reproduction by both seeds and vegetative means, forming root sprouts. In an adult stand, identification of ramets of one clone among the trees of seed origin based on their morphology is difficult. A panel of 14 microsatellite loci developed for individual identification of aspen was applied for the clonal structure analysis in four natural aspen stands of the European part of Russia: Moscow and Voronezh oblasts, the Mari-El Republic, and the Republic of Tatarstan. In 52 trees from the Moscow sample, 41 multilocus genotypes were identified; in the Voronezh sample, among 30 individuals, 25 different genotypes were detected; and in the sample from Mari-El, 32 trees were represented by 13 genotypes. In the stand from Sabinsky Forestry, Tatarstan, all of the examined 29 trees were represented by a single genotype. The ancestral tree carrier of this genotype which was the most heterozygous (0.929) among all studied aspen individuals (sample mean, 0.598) obviously has spread over a large territory during several cutting and reproduction cycles, currently occupying the area of 2.2 ha. For aspen, usually suffering from Aspen trunk rot, such high viability is evidence of resistance to the main pathogens. The revealed superclone deserves further study with karyological methods and flow cytometry to determine ploidy level and analysis of the growth rate and the quality of wood for possible use in plantation forest production.

Chemical composition of the leaf essential oil of grapefruits (Citrus paradisi Macf.) in relation with the genetic origin

The composition of twenty-four samples of essential oil isolated from leaves of Citrus paradisi Macf. growing in a northern area of citrus cultivation in Mediterranean climate (Corsica) was investigated by GC (RI), GC-MS and 13C NMR. Thirty-six compounds accounting for 94.9–99.3% of the oil composition were identified. The oils contained mainly monoterpene hydrocarbons and specially sabinene (up to 60.2%),(E)-β-ocimene (up to 15.0%) and punctually γ-terpinene (up to 56.1%), β-pinene (up to 30.9%) and p-cymene (up to 12.5%). The twenty-four compositions were submitted to k-means partitioning and principal component analysis, which allowed the distinction of one homogeneous group of twenty-two grapefruits (main compound sabinene, mean = 47.1%).This group included eighteen cultivars derived by mutation from the ancestral grapefruit tree (Duncan) and four cultivars known to be interspecific hybrids. Two out group cultivars were clearly differentiated from others by original chemical compositions, in agreement with their hybrid origin.

Many private mutations originate from the first few divisions of a human colorectal adenoma.

Intratumoural mutational heterogeneity (ITH) or the presence of different private mutations in different parts of the same tumour is commonly observed in human tumours. The mechanisms generating such ITH are uncertain. Here we find that ITH can be remarkably well structured by measuring point mutations, chromosome copy numbers, and DNA passenger methylation from opposite sides and individual glands of a 6 cm human colorectal adenoma. ITH was present between tumour sides and individual glands, but the private mutations were side-specific and subdivided the adenoma into two major subclones. Furthermore, ITH disappeared within individual glands because the glands were clonal populations composed of cells with identical mutant genotypes. Despite mutation clonality, the glands were relatively old, diverse populations when their individual cells were compared for passenger methylation and by FISH. These observations can be organized into an expanding star-like ancestral tree with co-clonal expansion, where many private mutations and multiple related clones arise during the first few divisions. As a consequence, most detectable mutational ITH in the final tumour originates from the first few divisions. Much of the early history of a tumour, especially the first few divisions, may be embedded within the detectable ITH of tumour genomes.

The coalescent point process of multi-type branching trees

We define a multi-type coalescent point process of a general branching process with countably many types. This multi-type coalescent fully describes the genealogy of the (quasi-stationary) standing population providing types along ancestral lineages of all individuals in the standing population. We show that the coalescent process is a functional of a certain Markov chain defined by the planar embedding of the multi-type branching process.We use the multi-type coalescent process to determine statistical properties of the ancestral tree, such as the time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of two consecutive individuals in the standing population, as well as of two individuals of the same type. These quantities are particularly simple to calculate for branching processes with a multi-type linear-fractional (LF) offspring distribution. We illustrate how an (a)symmetrical offspring distribution affects features of the ancestral tree in an example of a two-type LF branching processes.

Global distribution, diversity hot spots and niche transitions of an astaxanthin‐producing eukaryotic microbe

Microbes establish very diverse but still poorly understood associations with other microscopic or macroscopic organisms that do not follow the more conventional modes of competition or mutualism. Phaffia rhodozyma, an orange-coloured yeast that produces the biotechnologically relevant carotenoid astaxanthin, exhibits a Holarctic association with birch trees in temperate forests that contrasts with the more recent finding of a South American population associated with Nothofagus (southern beech) and with stromata of its biotrophic fungal parasite Cyttaria spp. We investigated whether the association of Phaffia with Nothofagus-Cyttaria could be expanded to Australasia, the other region of the world where Nothofagus are endemic, studied the genetic structure of populations representing the known worldwide distribution of Phaffia and analysed the evolution of the association with tree hosts. The phylogenetic analysis revealed that Phaffia diversity in Australasia is much higher than in other regions of the globe and that two endemic and markedly divergent lineages seem to represent new species. The observed genetic diversity correlates with host tree genera rather than with geography, which suggests that adaptation to the different niches is driving population structure in this yeast. The high genetic diversity and endemism in Australasia indicate that the genus evolved in this region and that the association with Nothofagus is the ancestral tree association. Estimates of the divergence times of Phaffia lineages point to splits that are much more recent than the break-up of Gondwana, supporting that long-distance dispersal rather than vicariance is responsible for observed distribution of P.rhodozyma.

Detection of heterogeneity and evolution of subclones in t(8;21) AML by QM-FISH

To explore the heterogeneous subclones in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with t(8;21) by quantitative multicolor- fluorescence in situ hybridization (QM-FISH), and to figure out whether there is putative ancestral relationship among different subclones. Bacterial artificial chromosomes (BAC) clones that contain the targeted genes including AML1, ETO, WT1, p27 and c-kit were searched in the data base UCSC Genome Bioinformatics. Multicolor FISH probes were prepared by linking fluorescein labeled dUTP or dCTP to targeted genes by nick translation. Bone marrow mononuclear cells from t (8;21) AML patients are dropped on to the wet surface of glass slides after hypotonic treatment and fixation. After hybridization, the fluorescence signals were captured by Zeiss fluorescence microscope. The copy number of AML1, ETO, WT1, p27, c- kit and the AML1-ETO fusion gene in AML1-ETO positive cells was counted. The cells with same signals were defined as a subclone. Various subclones were recorded and their proportions were calculated, and their evolutionary relationship was deduced. The subclones in matched primary and relapsed samples were compared, the evolution of dominant clones were figured out and the genomic abnormality that is associated with relapse and drug resistance were speculated. In this study, 36 primary AML with t(8;21) cases and 1 relapsed case paired with the primary case were detected. In these 36 primary cases, 4 cases (11.1%) acquired additional AML1-ETO fusion signal, 3(8.3%) had additional AML1 signal, 4(11.1%) had additional ETO signal, 20(55.6%) had additional WT1 signal, 15(41.7%) had additional p27 signal and 14(38.9%) had additional c-kit signal. In addition, 10(27.8%) displayed AML1 signal deletion, and such an aberration represents statistic significance in male patients. It seems that male patients usually accompany AML1 signal deletion. Of 36 cases, 28(77.8 %) harbored at least 2 subclones (ranged from 2 to 10). According to the genetic signature of subclones, we can assemble a putative ancestral tree, and the genetic architecture is linear or branching. In particular, the clonal architecture of the relapsed sample exhibited significant clonal evolution compared to its paired sample at diagnosis, including proportion changes in dominant clone, subclone disappearance and appearance of new dominant clones. Genomic abnormality is very diverse in t(8;21) AML. Subclones have linear or complex branching evolutionary histories, and clonal architecture is dynamic.

Gene genealogies for genetic association mapping, with application to Crohn's disease

A gene genealogy describes relationships among haplotypes sampled from a population. Knowledge of the gene genealogy for a set of haplotypes is useful for estimation of population genetic parameters and it also has potential application in finding disease-predisposing genetic variants. As the true gene genealogy is unknown, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches have been used to sample genealogies conditional on data at multiple genetic markers. We previously implemented an MCMC algorithm to sample from an approximation to the distribution of the gene genealogy conditional on haplotype data. Our approach samples ancestral trees, recombination and mutation rates at a genomic focal point. In this work, we describe how our sampler can be used to find disease-predisposing genetic variants in samples of cases and controls. We use a tree-based association statistic that quantifies the degree to which case haplotypes are more closely related to each other around the focal point than control haplotypes, without relying on a disease model. As the ancestral tree is a latent variable, so is the tree-based association statistic. We show how the sampler can be used to estimate the posterior distribution of the latent test statistic and corresponding latent p-values, which together comprise a fuzzy p-value. We illustrate the approach on a publicly-available dataset from a study of Crohn's disease that consists of genotypes at multiple SNP markers in a small genomic region. We estimate the posterior distribution of the tree-based association statistic and the recombination rate at multiple focal points in the region. Reassuringly, the posterior mean recombination rates estimated at the different focal points are consistent with previously published estimates. The tree-based association approach finds multiple sub-regions where the case haplotypes are more genetically related than the control haplotypes, and that there may be one or multiple disease-predisposing loci.

The First Geogarypid (Pseudoscorpiones, Geogarypidae) in Rovno Amber (Ukraine)

The First Geogarypid (Pseudoscorpiones, Geogarypidae) in Rovno Amber (Ukraine)The firstGeogarypusfound in Rovno amber appears to be conspecific withGeogarypus gorskiiHenderickx 2005, a species known from Eocene Baltic amber.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama Susan Currell Tamsen Wolff. Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 278, illustrated. $90.00 (Hb). The title of Tamsen Wolff's book comes from a mechanical display model called "Mendel's Theatre" that was used by the eugenic movement to teach theories of genetic inheritance to early-twentieth-century Americans. This performance was played to those who were to become the chief actors and directors in an offstage drama: potential field-workers who would go into communities to help direct future progress towards human betterment. As this audience was mostly female, eugenicists attempted to convey scientific concepts clearly; in order to make visible what was invisible, they relied heavily on performance and theatricality. "Mendel's Theatre" was shaped like a proscenium stage embedded with a rolling scroll on which three acts "detail[ed] with pictures and dolls the inexorable drama of the Mendelian inheritance of human hair and skin color" (61). The analogy between the eugenicist dramatization of the theories of inheritance and modern dramaturgy continues throughout Wolff's well-researched, fascinating, and extremely convincing book, which argues that the eugenic movement was inherently theatrical and that modern drama engaged with (and was enlivened by) both the ideas and the theatricality of that movement. The book is an original and compelling dramatization in both theme and style: tracing the origins of dramatic fascination with the theme of heredity, Wolff builds her own ancestral tree, beginning with a chapter on the "Predecessors" of American eugenic drama–Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw–and ending with a chapter titled "A Genealogy of American Theatre." Paying clear attention to the ambiguities, ambivalences, and downright contradictions of eugenic thought in the early twentieth century, Wolff shows how dramatists adapted and adjusted their stagecraft to present prevailing hereditarian ideas. For Ibsen and Strindberg (whose pre-Mendelian era plays connected them to a more confused or complex neo-Darwinism, such as environmental or Lamarckian eugenics), this was more a thematic concern to make visible in the present the impact [End Page 595] of an unseen past. Subsequently a major goal of modern drama, revealing the hidden (or recessive traits and genes) was a similar concern for eugenic pedagogy, as shown in Mendel's Theatre. Once Mendelian genetic theory was rediscovered in 1900, the shift in eugenic thought also emerged in a dramaturgical shift, most clearly in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Developing his own theory of "Creative Evolution" (37), Shaw built on Ibsen and Strindberg to stage explicit dramas of eugenic idealism (however confused it may have been at the time), and those dramas subsequently influenced the American dramatists Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, whose works and engagement with eugenics are the central focus of the book. The reception and production of hereditarian theatre in America was particularly strong, Wolff argues, because eugenic thought was widely accepted, along with progressive discourses about the future of the American population. In many ways, she correctly points out, America was the stage on which the eugenic drama would unfold. Wolff provides a useful outline of the development of the eugenic movement in America, and, while much of this development has been detailed before, she stays focused on its central relationship to dramatic developments. Chapters on Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and O'Neill's Strange Interlude provide close readings of both the themes and stage-craft associated with prevailing eugenic ideas and ideologies, showing that the very contradictions in such thought operated to make complex and ambiguous stage dramas. While inflected by eugenic thought, The Verge also dramatized and undercut a rhetoric that would deny women agency and put unsustainable faith in the evidence of the unseen and unknowable. Similarly, Strange Interlude–called by one contemporary critic the "Eugenic O'Neill Baby" (qtd. in Wolff 142)–enacted the production of a eugenic child and its consequences in a nine-act drama that was incredibly popular at the time (though never since). As in Ibsen and Strindberg, the problem of free will created a dramatic tension with the eugenic message of unseen forces directing human behaviour...