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Updated: June 3, 2025
Since Weissmann's time, however, every Lamarckian feels it necessary to suggest some method by which the altered body of the parent can produce modifications in the germ plasms from which the young are to spring. One of our later biologists begins to talk of some effect comparable with wireless telegraphy or induced electricity.
But about 1887 a faction or school arose who criticized the main idea of Darwin and Wallace and fell back on the Lamarckian factor of the transmission of acquired characters as really the essential cause of the process of evolution.
Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and declared it exorcized. He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was "quite unnecessary."
In regard to the marvellous phenomena of “carnivorous” plants, the still more marvellous instincts of animals, which cannot be interpreted on Lamarckian lines as “inherited habit,” but only as due to the cumulative influence of selection on inborn tendencies, as well as in regard to “symbiosis,” “the origin of flowers,” and so on, he attempts to show that the heterodox attempts at explanation are insufficient, and that selection alone really explains.
I do not know of any proposition that has been put before us with the intention of explaining the phenomena of organic nature, which has in its favour a thousandth part of the evidence which may be adduced in favour of Mr. Darwin's views. Whatever may be the objections to his views, certainly all other theories are absolutely out of court. Take the Lamarckian hypothesis, for example.
Darwin's later style passing this over as having been written some twenty years before the "Origin of Species" the last paragraph of the "Origin of Species" itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian. Where are the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now?
A very small effect, provided it can be repeated and accumulated in successive generations, is all that even the most exacting Lamarckian will ask for.
To Darwin this struggle for existence and this selection according to utility seemed, at any rate, the chief factor in progress. He did, indeed, make some concessions to the Lamarckian principle that new characters may be acquired by increased use, and to other “secondary” principles. But these are of small importance as compared with his main factor.
The “Lamarckian” view as opposed to the Darwinian continues to hold its own, and indeed is more ardently supported than ever. On this view, evolution has been accomplished not by a laborious selection of the best which chanced to present itself—a selection in relation to which organisms remained passive, but rather through the exertions of the organisms themselves.
Darwin explains the fact that giraffes have long necks, and nine of them will answer "through continually stretching them to reach higher and higher boughs." They do not understand that this is the Lamarckian view of evolution, not the Darwinian; nor will Mr. Allen's book greatly help the ordinary reader to catch the difference between the two theories, in spite of his frequent reference to Mr.
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