unit character

American  

noun

Genetics.

1. a characteristic, usually controlled by a single gene, that is transmitted as a unit in heredity.

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unit character British  

noun

1. genetics a character inherited as a single unit and dependent on a single gene

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Etymology

Origin of unit character

First recorded in 1905–10

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

unit character

Other decals boasted unit character through their fearsome, comical or fanciful logos: thunderbirds, doves, seahorses, wolves, warthogs, lions, tigers, bears, cobras, elephants, alligators, sharks.

From New York Times ● Jul. 20, 2012

To say, then, that any mental trait is a unit character, or that it is due to a single germinal difference, is to go beyond both the evidence and the probabilities.

From Applied Eugenics by Popenoe, Paul

The patriotic frame of mind has been spoken of above as if it were an hereditary trait, something after the fashion of a Mendelian unit character.

From An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation by Veblen, Thorstein

Here, as elsewhere in tracing hereditariness in so-called functional nervosities, one should take as the unit character for study the mental traits or trends and exclude definite disease entities applied to ancestral disorders.

From The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 10 by Various

The reckless use of the phrase "unit character" has done much to mislead the uninitiated as to the effects that a single change in the germ plasm may produce on the organism.

From A Critique of the Theory of Evolution by Morgan, Thomas Hunt