High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pangenesis was Charles Darwin`s hypothetical mechanism for heredity. He presented this `provisional hypothesis` in his 1868 work The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and felt that it brought `together a multitude of facts which are at present left disconnected by any efficient cause`. The etymology of the word comes from the Greek words pan (a prefix meaning "whole", "encompassing") and genesis ("birth") or genos ("origin").