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Updated: May 6, 2025
As an instance: Owen, in speaking of the dugong, says, "The generative organs being those which are most remotely related to the habits and food of an animal, I have always regarded as affording very clear indications of its true affinities. We are least likely in the modifications of these organs to mistake a merely adaptive for an essential character."
Impulsive he might be, enthusiastic, sensitive, with something sympathetic and adaptive in his disposition; but an observer of nature's tokens would have confidently pledged himself that there was native firmness and strength underlying his gentle, monk-bred ways.
On my view of characters being of real importance for classification, only in so far as they reveal descent, we can clearly understand why analogical or adaptive character, although of the utmost importance to the welfare of the being, are almost valueless to the systematist.
Osborn uses the word "directed." Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited to their purpose from the start; they do not have to be fitted to their place by natural selection. Huxley uses the word "predestined" all the life of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are working out in boundless space and in endless time "their predestined course of evolution."
He says: "Aristotle clearly states and rejects a theory of the origin of adaptive structures in animals altogether similar to that of Darwin."
I have gained a companion as well as a wife; and marvellously adaptive as young women are, I am conceited enough to think my ideas have travelled beyond the ideas of most girls of eighteen; and I am not conceited enough to suppose the girl of eighteen would not find me an old fogey very much in the way. Let boys mate with girls, say I, and men with women." Lady Mary smiled in spite of herself.
Of the absence of fraud I am personally convinced, not only by the characters of all concerned, but by the nature of the circumstances. That adaptive memory did not later alter the narratives, as originally told, I feel certain, because they were reported to me, when I was not present, within less than a week, precisely as they are now given, except in cases specially noted.
And yet, at the outset of his studies, he finds that no adaptive reason whatsoever can be given for one-half of the peculiarities of vegetable structure; he also discovers rudimentary teeth, which are never used, in the gums of the young calf and in those of the foetal whale; insects which never bite have rudimental jaws, and others which never fly have rudimental wings; naturally blind creatures have rudimental eyes; and the halt have rudimentary limbs.
Like the ruling classes elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change in the conditions of life.
The present writer, on the other hand, believes that not only are adaptive characters distinct from non-adaptive specific characters, and from non-adaptive diagnostic characters in general, but that their origin and evolution are entirely distinct and different.
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