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The Malanaus seem to be by nature peculiarly round-headed; the question whether this is due to the effects of head-flattening practised for many generations, must be left to the investigations of the Neo-Lamarckians.
We have since come to think that its industry is less continuous: that the clock stops for a long time, and then is suddenly 'put on' by a mysterious finger. But never mind that just at present. I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians. I was a Neo-Lamarckian.
Opposing these Neo-Lamarckians were such prominent scientists as August Weismann, A.R. Wallace, E. Ray Lankester, who strenuously opposed the idea that "acquired characters," or more precisely parental experience, are ever transmissible.
The neo-Lamarckian conflict with Darwinism has become more and more acute in recent times, and the neo-Lamarckians have sometimes passed from contrasting rival interpretations to excluding the Darwinian factor altogether. As the particular champion of the neo-Lamarckian view, we must name Th. Eimer, the recently deceased Tübingen zoologist.
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.
Certain neo-Lamarckians do indeed resort to a cause of a psychological nature. There, to our thinking, is one of the most solid positions of neo-Lamarckism. But if this cause is nothing but the conscious effort of the individual, it cannot operate in more than a restricted number of cases at most in the animal world, and not at all in the vegetable kingdom.
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.
One group is called the Neo-Lamarckians; they assume a direct modifying agency of the environment, producing a corresponding and useful change in the organization. The other group call themselves Darwinians or selectionists, but to my mind with no other right beyond the arbitrary restriction of the Darwinian principles by Wallace.
These Neo-Lamarckians argued that natural selection alone can neither explain the origin of varieties, nor the first steps in the slow advance toward "usefulness." An organ must be already useful before natural selection can take hold of it to improve it.
Haeckel also became an advocate of this idea, and presently there arose a so-called school of neo-Lamarckians, which developed particular strength and prominence in America under the leadership of Professors A. Hyatt and E. D. Cope.
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