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Updated: May 3, 2025
The various theories of organic evolution, whether Lamarckian, neo-Lamarckian, or Darwinian, are based upon the assumption that animals and plants have a tendency to perpetuate by transmission to offspring a variation which has proven useful as an aid to the particular species in its struggle for existence.
The tide has now turned; and every puny whipster may say what he likes about Darwin; but anyone who wants to know what it was to be a Lamarckian during the last quarter of the nineteenth century has only to read Mr Festing Jones's memoir of Samuel Butler to learn how completely even a man of genius could isolate himself by antagonizing Darwin on the one hand and the Church on the other.
This is all that is necessary for my case, and I do not find that Professor Weismann, after all, disputes it. But here, again, comes the difficulty of saying what Professor Weismann does, and what he does not, dispute. One moment he gives all that is wanted for the Lamarckian contention, the next he denies common sense the bare necessaries of life.
Spencer would consent to being called a Lamarckian pure and simple, nor yet how far it is strictly accurate to call him one; nevertheless, I can see no important difference in the main positions taken by him and by Lamarck. The question at issue between the Lamarckians, supported by Mr.
The Lamarckian hypothesis has long since been justly condemned, and it is the established practice for every tyro to raise his heel against the carcass of the dead lion. But it is rarely either wise or instructive to treat even the errors of a really great man with mere ridicule, and in the present case the logical form of the doctrine stands on a very different footing from its substance.
This theory of Orthogenesis has not figured very strongly in the history of the movement, but it recurs at intervals. Both in America and France there is a constant tendency on the part of zoölogists to return to the Lamarckian idea that it is the use of an organ that develops it, its disuse that makes it fade away.
Since Lamarck's time, almost all competent naturalists have left speculations on the origin of species to such dreamers as the author of the 'Vestiges', by whose well-intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers.
It is exactly the standpoint of the popular naturalism we have already described, which here mingles unsuspectingly and without scruple Lamarckian and other principles with the Darwinian, which is enthusiastic on the one hand over the “purely mechanical” interpretation of nature, and on the other drags in directly psychical motives, unconscious consciousness, impulses, spontaneous self-differentiation of organisms, which nevertheless adheres to “monism” and possibly even professes to share Goethe’s conception of nature!
But from the Lamarckian point of view the facts support the conclusion that the condition is the effect of certain mechanical strains, and is of somatic origin, while the correlations here reviewed are entirely unexplained by any theory of mutation or blastogenic origin.
The possibility of a Lamarckian explanation he does not even mention. He would doubtless assume that the antlers of stags arose as a mutation, without explaining how they came to be affected by the testicular hormone, and that when they arose the stags found them convenient as fighting weapons. But the complicated adaptive relations are not to be disposed of by the simple word mutation.
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