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"No, because the mutation, after taking place, persists from generation to generation, not with pathological characteristics, but with completely normal ones." "It is most curious." "These experiments have produced Neo-Darwinism.
One type, following the principles of neo-Darwinism, regards instinct as a sum of accidental differences preserved by selection: such and such a useful behavior, naturally adopted by the individual in virtue of an accidental predisposition of the germ, has been transmitted from germ to germ, waiting for chance to add fresh improvements to it by the same method.
Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it.
At the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism.
I had as yet no idea that a writer could attack Neo-Darwinism without attacking evolution. But my friend kindly sent me a copy; and when I read it, I found myself in the presence of arguments different from those I had met with hitherto, and did not see my way to answering them.
If it makes the universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe. The question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a personal one.
Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful.
The soul of Darwinism, is it not wholly in the variability, organic and functional, of individuals and species, under the modifying influence of the environment, fixed and transmitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself, does it not consist wholly in the constantly increasing importance attributed to the changes in the environment as explanations of the variations of living beings?
If it makes the universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe. The question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a personal one.
On the one hand we have the Darwinism of Darwin freed from inconsequent additions and formulated as orthodox “neo-Darwinism”; on the other hand we have heterodox Lamarckism. The “all-sufficiency” of natural selection is proclaimed by some, its impotence by others.
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