This week in class, we discussed Yaakov's sheep breeding. When Yaakov confronted Lavan about going back to Canaan, Lavan convinced him to stay. Yaakov's main goal at this point was to take care of his family. He asked Lavan if he could tend his sheep. Lavan made super-complicated conditions for Yaakov to tend the sheep. First, Yaakov could only keep the speckled and spotted sheep from Lavan's flock. Second, Lavan gave Yaakov the white flock to tend and put a three day distance between the two men. Yaakov saw this "obstacle" as a chance to prosper. He took the heterozygous white sheep (one allele for white fleece and one for speckled or spotted fleece) and bred them with each other. This would produce (on average) three white sheep (two heterozygous and one homozygous offspring) and one speckled and spotted sheep. Yaakov then bred the speckled and spotted offspring together. The only possible outcome of this union is a speckled and spotted sheep since being speckled and spotted is a recessive trait.
During our class discussion, we said that Yaakov was WAY ahead of his time. For the rest of the world, genetics came to the forefront of scientific study after the works of Gregor Mendel gained recognition. Yaakov was actually the first person in recorded history to realize that living organisms could be bred for certain traits. Obviously, he did this correctly and managed to produce an entire flock of speckled and spotted sheep. Unfortunately, people do not recognize Yaakov as the father of genetics. I wonder if Yaakov was ahead of his time in any other areas. Any ideas?
Yaakov may not have been so far ahead in other areas, though he very well might have been, Moshe and Yisro definitely had ideas of the future. We know that they were the first to come up with a hierarchical court system. They had different levels of courts sort of the way we do today with ours.
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