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Oh, we are very practical, Hester and I. And we are both strong enough to lead each our own lives. Which reminds me that you have not asked about her. First, let me shock you she, too, is a scientist. It was in my undergraduate days that we met, and ere the half-hour struck we were quarrelling felicitously over Weismann and the neo-Darwinians.
And yet, when we see with what sureness and precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined manoeuvres the orchids perform to procure their fertilization by means of insects, how can we help thinking that these are so many instincts? This is not saying that the theory of the neo-Darwinians must be altogether rejected, any more than that of the neo-Lamarckians.
Natural selection has in man the important but subordinate position of the judge in a criminal court, to pronounce the death verdict on the hopeless and incorrigible. Both Neo-Darwinians and Neo-Lamarckians have erred in being too exclusively mechanical in their theories. It is the main business of the scientific man to discover and study mechanisms.
DeVries of recent years has revised it, but with distinct modifications, and most biologists pay no attention to it. There is a school of biologists, headed by Weissman, who have come to be known as Neo-Darwinians. These men have insisted that Natural Selection, if properly understood and developed, is quite sufficient to account for the fact of evolution, including the appearance of variations.
The neo-Darwinians are probably right, we believe, when they teach that the essential causes of variation are the differences inherent in the germ borne by the individual, and not the experiences or behavior of the individual in the course of his career. Where we fail to follow these biologists, is in regarding the differences inherent in the germ as purely accidental and individual.
In Nägeli's theory initial tendency is overwhelmingly dominant; in Weismann's, natural selection is almighty. Weismann's followers have received the name of Neo-Darwinians. The so-called Neo-Lamarckian school believes in the transmissibility of acquired characteristics, and of at least particular effects of use and disuse. The one theory is neither more nor less Darwinian than the other.
Long before Darwin published a line, the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest survive.
Accordingly, I find that in the year 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at the Neo-Darwinians in the following terms.
Now Darwin himself was ready to allow that use and disuse might have some influence on the offspring's inheritance; but he thought that this influence was small as compared with the influence of what, for want of a better term, he called spontaneous variation. Certain of his followers, however, who call themselves Neo-Darwinians, are ready to go one better.
To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive; to omit, in short, the highest moral claim of Evolutionary Selection: all this, which the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural Selection, shewed the most pitiable want of mastery of their own subject, the dullest lack of observation of the forces upon which Natural Selection works.
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